How do you get away from Tenniel?

I am thinking about trying to produce my own illustration based on Alice in Wonderland or Alice Through the Looking Glass. Over the last 6 weeks or so I’ve made copies of almost forty illustrations of the  books by various artists. It’s time I had a go at putting my own stamp on it.

However.

There are a couple of problems. The first sounds like false modesty, but it really isn’t. I don’t have the skill of being able to conjure up good illustrations off the top of my own head, purely through my own imagination. John Tenniel had the most incredible visual memory. I don’t.

The second problem is one which has faced every other illustrator of the books since John Tenniel, namely, how do you get away from Tenniel’s illustrations? It’s a fair question. One way of doing it that we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks is to do something completely different. For example, Mervyn Peake’s frankly evil looking Cheshire Cat. Which is doable because nobody actually knows exactly what a Cheshire Cat should look like.

But how do you get away from Tenniel when all logic dictates that what you draw must inevitably end up looking similar? Well, here’s my copy of Tenniel’s Fish and frog footmen.

Let's compare it with my copy of a Mervyn Peake illustration of the fish footman. 

Superficially, they're pretty similar - similar costume with the breeches, the wig and the long tail coat - similar letters. However Peake manages to put his own stamp on this partly through having very minimal - almost non-existent background - and partly through depicting the fish running. One of the things I've noticed about Tenniel's illustrations is that the vast majority are static. Even some of the ones where characters are moving are strangely still. Off the top of my head, there's one from Wonderland with Bill the Lizard shooting out of the chimney, another with the Hatter storming off with his hat over his eyes, and in Looking Glass there's the Red Queen flying along with Alice in her wake. Other than that though the characters are often standing, or sitting, or striking poses. So depicting characters in movement is an option for getting away from Tenniel

This is one of Arthur Rackham's illustrations. Again, superficially the frog footman looks to be at the very least a close cousin of Tenniel's. As with Peake, there's a contrast with the way that Tenniel uses background in his illustration. Rackham could do very detailed background and I always felt that his depiction of forests and trees is masterly. Here, though, the background is extremely sketchy, especially when compared with Tenniel's. I don't think it's coincidence that Rackham chooses to depict the frog sitting, while it is standing stiffly, almost to attention, in Tenniel's. 

So, drawing a few lessons together from this, I can get away from Tenniel by firstly, thinking about the conception of the characters themselves, but also by thinking carefully about the way I use background detail, and also the positions of the characters, and the amount of movement in the picture.

None of which answers the question, though - if I am going to have a go at an Alice books illustration, which character or scene from the book am I going to have a go at?