Jabberwocky - Style Evolves

I've been drawing out some thumbnails and miniature versions of Jabberwocky in order to figure out the style and setup of what I'm going to be making. I've got a good idea now of what it will look like. I did a bit more research because I wanted to get more of a Victorian feel to the book, since the poem was written in 1872. Here are a few things I've found that are influencing the final design:

I just can't resist adding a few gears. This is Steampunk Dragon by Kerem Beyit. The Jabberwock will be more of a decorative element than a full illustration, but the parts that are showing will have a bit of a mechanical feeling to them, and be patterned after some of the fancy Victorian swirls and flourishes used to decorate posters and books.

Like these ones. I'm also going to use them to decorate the punctuation marks. There are so many exclamation marks in this short poem, and I just plain love ampersands and can't resist fancying them up a bit. There are loads of neat corner flourishes and borders out there, but I think it will look out of place to have random decorations floating on the pages (given especially the maze shape of the book), so I'm only going to use these designs where they can be worked into the text and illustrations.

From the British Library. Normally the rule for graphic design is TWO FONTS, period. It's actually an enormous irritant of mine to see work with multiple fonts, colours, styles, sizes... Yet for reasons that escape me entirely Victorian posters are nothing but a mix of different types, and it works very well.

This beautiful poster is available from Angry, Young, and Poor. I was really excited to stumble across this one because it's very similar to the colour palette I had in mind. I found a few posters with this diagonal layout for the main word/title, as well as a fancy first letter, and that's going to be worked into a few of my own layouts.