An art book project to showcase the characters and world of my original, in-progress fantasy series, Ignoble Blood.
In planning this project, it was my goal to showcase my design, illustration, and writing talents.
I wanted to create a book design that spoke of Ignoble Blood's hard fantasy roots without looking overly historical. The Ignoble Blood universe is a fictional one, after all.
I experimented with a wide variety of font faces and configurations, the goal being to find a combination which was less medieval and more modern fantasy.
In the end, I landed on something which I believe is evocative of both the beauty and brutality of Ignoble Blood's world: a harmony of gothic and script type faces.
My intention was to start slow, to create simple illustrations whose sole purpose was to showcase each character's unique flavor and design.
One of my favorite bonus features of modern video games is the ability to view detailed character models, and often these models are isolated on a sort of cross-sectioned platform. This became my inspiration for the format of these character vignettes.
It has long been a dream of mine to create an art book. This in-progress book is only the first in a planned series, each of which is to be based on a corresponding novel.
The first in this series of novels is titled The Ashes of Hope. In it, a young noble must reckon with a dangerous foreign adversary, navigate his fraught relationship with his father, and negotiate all the pitfalls of growing into a responsible adult—all while an ancient and existential threat looms on the horizon.
