Dear patrons, hello! I’m very happy to finally be able to share with you what I believe has been my most challenging project to date: full-wrap covers for two books, volumes 1 and 2 of the Myriad Lands anthology published by Guardbridge Books!
Some time ago, I shared the .gif timelapse of these pieces with you on Patreon. I thought those .gifs looked pretty cool (honestly, when I was starting to flag because it felt like there was no way I’d ever finish the pieces and make them look good, I went and looked at the .gifs and tried to tell myself “you’ve come so far, you can go the distance” — haha!) and so I was really excited to create timelapse .gifs with the complete pieces. Aaaaaaaaaand– here they are!
(Please allow them some time to load if you can’t see them right away; they’re pretty large files! If you’d like to view the full size, just click on the image!)
This first piece is a dusk/sunset marketplace, as the artwork for fantasy stories set in this world but throughout a variety of cultures and places; I pitched the idea to the publisher because I thought a market scene would better evoke that diversity, the multitudes of stories people have to tell, rather than a single figure. I wanted to incorporate all the backgrounds from the stories in the anthology, you see! Of course, this turned out to be a case of “my eyes are bigger than my stomach” because — well — it was a great idea! Grand, even! But, erm– crowd scenes are not my forte; quite the opposite, in fact! And architecture? Cityscapes? I’m terrible at them. My strengths, such as they are, lie in single-figure pieces, in intimate (read: small) settings, where I don’t have to worry about pesky things like perspective, or even the dimensionality of space.
This is a failing I’ve been aware of for years; it’s not something I really wanted to actively correct (sorry! see, my shameful confession). But then last year I had a project where I illustrated stories for a fiction journal, and most of the stories were set in cities, and me being very good (read: awful) at making sure my pitch and my skills/strengths sync up, I decided that the way I’d do the illustrations would be to superimpose a Significant Object over a Significant Place. Which meant a lot of work on cities, and tearing my hair out, and slowly — against my will — learning how urban environments worked, how the various shapes fit together. That prepared me for this project. Not in the sense of “oh, I’m a master at drawing crowds and cities” but “I’ve done something hard and full of buildings before; if I work hard, I can do this too”.
Which I think is part of that steadfast, ever-comforting truth, that hard work will not betray you. It’s not wasted. It’s what you stand on, planting your feet firmly on the fact that you have done a hard thing before, pushed outside your comfort zone, and you’re still going.
…And it’s good that one can stand on one’s past work — and, you know, I feel like I failed terribly with that old project, and part of me feels like I failed terribly with this one too, but the truth is it doesn’t matter whether you failed or didn’t when doing the work, the work is still the work, you still did it — because goodness did I overreach on this project! The second piece is a bridge lined with portals leading to other realms, with fountains and gardens for beauty and comfort. The idea for this was originally just a council room, with windows looking out onto different worlds, since volume 2 featured secondary world fantasy. Then I was like, “huh, that’s kind of boring, why not a huge assembly hall?” –But even that wasn’t fun enough, it felt crowded and enclosed when what I wanted to evoke was the idea of something limitless, like horizons and interdimensional travel and flight and huge wide open skies– So it became an outdoor plaza, and then the plaza didn’t have enough motion in it, so it became a curved arch littered with portals, and then those looked too clunky and lacked focus, so it became a bridge. And then– “what,” I realized too late, “do I put in the center part of the bridge?!?” –the bridge sprouted fountains and gardens, because mosaic tile patterns as paving for the bridge were apparently not interesting enough. And of course — of course! — it had to be done in the blue/green color range, because that’s the range I’m the least comfortable with and for some reason it was the only one that would suit. (I tried, partway through this, to see if I could shift the colors to purple and magenta, which I am far more experienced with; my partner told me I should stay out of my comfort zone. See! This is why she’s such a good business manager for me.)
My brain is a funny thing; I tell myself “these are my limits” and then my brain goes “huh, I bet I could jump higher than that.”
And– I don’t know if I did, with these; there are a thousand things I’d change with each piece, so many mistakes I see when I look at them; to me they feel clumsy and unskilled and rough in comparison to a lot of people who do environments and amazing epic landscapes; I look at other fantasy covers and I feel like I’m shriveling up inside, or I want to weep, because these feel like children’s crayon drawings in comparison. In that regard part of my brain says I’ve failed, because they’re not perfect, not even close, and also because they don’t measure up to what others do, with their flawless renderings and exquisitely detailed digital art.
But… they are finished pieces, for all that I thought, even as I worked on them, there was no way I’d finish them. They’re complete pieces, and if you’d asked me last year if I could imagine doing things of this scale — not in physical dimension but in composition and ambition — I’d have laughed. They seek to express something great, and while they do it very clumsily, they still try. I think that means something; I think it means something that in these pieces I worked on technical problems I’d never addressed before, and did new things, and learned a lot, and challenged myself, and didn’t back down from the challenge.
And they’ve made people feel things. Which I think is what I’m aiming for these days with my art. There’s no way I’m going to be the next Victo Ngai or Julie Dillon; they have different techniques and styles. But I can be, well, Likhain, who messes up a lot and stubbornly persists with traditional art even as she bemoans the lack of an undo button or layers. And I can try and reach people’s hearts with as intense a punch of color and beauty and joy as I possibly can.
These are the full cover images I ended up with. As you can see, I extended the marketplace one a bit, as the publisher wanted to crop it past the center and I needed to do a watercolor wash and merge it with the buildings so there would be enough art for the back cover.
The publisher has shared the covers for the books, too! I don’t think he’s put the pre-order page up yet, but I’ll include a link in one of my updates when he does.
Thank you, as always, for being here. For believing in my art, and supporting it. For listening to these rambles about process and the convoluted trails my thought follows while I work on pieces, from concept to execution to living with the finished work. Actually– for being here, alongside me, throughout the work. Maraming salamat! I hope your day is full of truest brightness.