Friday, August 10, 2018

City of Countless Names- Illustrations


The work on the fine finishing details for North of the Golden Horn continues. Right now we are proofreading, formatting, writing some introductory text, and finalizing the illustrations. Much like City of Countless Names, North of the Golden Shore will be fully illustrated with over 25 period sketches, landscapes, and street scenes gloriously spread over its 35 pages. I give my undying thanks to the British Library and Internet Archive’s Flickr streams for providing the original artworks.
Here are a few of the finished illustrations:


 Some pieces are pretty much perfect. They just need a little clean-up and some cropping. This illustration of Dolmabagtche Palace captures the grandeur of Beshiktash. Some contrast and saturation adjustment and it’s ready.


 At its heart, this whole project strives to bring life in Constantinople to the gaming table. I mixed in an interesting assortment of street scenes showing common everyday occurrences and people, but whenever I can I try to give them a subtle Victoriana twist. For example, in this picture, I shrunk down the farmer and made him a little stockier to indicate his dwarven heritage. Simple and subtle.


In contrast, I had to do a fair bit of dancing in my editing program to get that ogre behind the soldiers. I am very proud of how well he blends in, and if you look closely, the slim soldier in the foreground has elf ears. Wherever I could, I pulled elements from Victoriana’s setting into the illustrations, because the words on the page give the Gamemaster facts and rules, but the art is where the style and tone most effectively shine through.

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