Jabberwocky - I give up!

I came to the conclusion a few days ago that this is a ridiculous project to attempt as an edition. It's just going to be a single, handwritten volume. It's simply to large and unwieldy to make any other way. I'm going to make a book edition soon, but I will start with a much simpler format. I may use Jabberwocky again as well, since I already have ideas for how I'd like to do it. As it is, here's what I've managed in the last couple of days. It looks a few hours to pencil out the layout on the big piece of watercolour that will become the book, especially because I kept putting things in the wrong square and had to erase all my beautiful sketches. It's a full 22" x 30"piece (140lb cold press), but after all the folding the book will only be about 2 3/4" x 6". I haven't torn the maze pattern out yet because I don't want to compromise the paper until absolutely necessary. All the turning and folding could really damage the edges, so I'm not going to until I need to actually ink on the edges. This will going to put a lot of pressure on me to tear it perfectly, because I don't want to restart at this point!

Apologies for the crappy photos, light pencil doesn't show up very well.

Time spent on this part of the project: 5 hours.

Jabberwocky - Trials and layout

I've been playing around with what the text would look like for Jabberwocky, and here are a couple of the thumbnails I've come up with. I experimented with the size, spacing, and font in the red picture. I want the strangeness of mixing up font elements, but I'm also going to orient the words strangely: upside-down, sideways etc. I want to keep the letters packed in like that, and may even remove the spacing between words, because it makes the text look more like a design element and, again, makes it stranger. 

I'm going to work in a couple spots where the text is in negative as well. The black areas, including the dense text, will contrast in the final book with the parts that have no or little writing, especially given the maze book shape I've chosen.

I've made a three mini books on scrap paper to work out the layout. It looks pretty cool when it's all folded up!

A photo of the other side of the book. I like it a little better with less colour, so I may cut down on the amount of Jabberwock illustrating the pages, or maybe use less colour (I have it in yellow and green right now).

 This is the layout when it's not folded up. I accidentally grabbed an orange pencil instead of red, but it looks OK anyway. That's going to be a stand-out panel with 'O frabjous day' on it.

From the other side. The blanks are where the last verse, the repeat of the first will be. I am actually going to reuse the lino cut from the first verse because the layout works a second time, which is a piece of good favour I'm going to take full advantage of.. I'm just too lazy to draw it twice.

Logistics:

Between the additional research from the last post, and all these drawings, I've done about 9 more hours on this book.