I began creating the Jabberwock by capturing the head of a crocodile, which I then attached to the body of a snake and the claws of an iguana, playing with the color and stretching and skewing and blurring and resizing. I merged the head layer and the snake body layer early in the process. It actually made things much more difficult later and I regretted doing it.

The iguana claws are actually the same claw reversed and stretched differently.

I added the larger lizard eyes (again it’s the same eye used for both the left and the right,) dramatically recoloring the iris and cornea.

The batwings were added next, again rehued, stretched and skewed.

It’s actually really hard to find pictures where the subject is facing away, but this knight was found from a French plastic toy display, and very little needed to be done to him.
(Except for the sword, I did do the sword...)

I had originally meant for a Tumtum tree (a Joshua tree) to be the background, and the ground the Jabberwock and boy are standing on is still that same picture, but when I came up with the idea of putting the poem on a book, adjusting the Joshua tree image to look like an illustration just felt right. (If you hide the layer of the book and illustration in the photoshop image you can see what it might have looked like otherwise)

Then each paragraph of the poem needed to be a separate text entry so that its position could be adjusted.

Finally I decided to add a section to the Jabberwock because the tail wasn’t looking long enough, this was a copy of the existing tail, stretched and made translucent. I then reduced the opacity of the left wing and arm to give the Jabberwock the appearance of coming out of the illustration.