The Face of Glass + another Kickstarter!
10 months ago
– Tue, Jan 23, 2024 at 11:21:17 AM
Before I get to today's sneak peek, I wanted to point y'all toward the Kickstarter currently underway for The Inkbrush Rune Deck. Like our own pattern cards, this is an oracle deck rather than a tarot per se, which I always find appealing; as the name implies, this one uses Norse runes for its content. I find the artwork really intriguing:
Given that I know some of our backers were drawn here by an interest in such things, I thought this one might appeal! You've got about three weeks left to back it.
Now for our own project, I have another preview of samples from Avery, and an interesting aspect I really hadn't considered before she brought it up.
Understand, I'm not really a visual artist. I do photography (check that out on my site!), and yes, that's a form of visual art, but it's a pretty different beast from drawing/painting/otherwise creating the picture from scratch yourself. And while I don't have aphantasia, my visual imagination is not super highly developed, so the mental images I have of the Faces and Masks have always been vague at best.
Which means it threw me for a loop when Avery asked whether we wanted the faces to be the same between The Face of Glass and The Mask of Mirrors -- as in, the facial structure. I . . . hadn't really thought about it? To me, many of the descriptions I gave her (e.g. "this one should be all feathers") overrode such considerations, since the end result was not going to look much like a normal human. But her question is extremely pertinent, and I'm glad she asked it!
We're not sure yet what the final answer will be. From a worldbuilding perspective, it makes sense to give the same facial structure to each pair, since the Faces and the Masks are two aspects of a single deity. Having there be an underlying resemblance, even if it then gets covered over with feathers or pared down to a skull, reinforces that idea. But there's also the question of aesthetics and which of the samples Avery sends us that we like best in its own right.
For the one I'm sharing today, we don't have a final answer yet. But here are the six sketches she sent for The Face of Glass -- which general design do you think we'll be using for the finished card?
--Marie
Happy New Year from The Face of Stars!
11 months ago
– Mon, Jan 08, 2024 at 04:27:48 PM
Happy 2024, everyone! May this year be better than the last -- a sentiment I think can always apply, regardless of how you feel 2023 went for you.
As I believe I promised last time, for this update we'll be taking a look at the process for the Faces and the Masks! Avery takes a different approach from A.C.; rather than providing a single rough sketch which then might be revised or replaced entirely, she sends me and Alyc six sketches . . . though honestly, I think "sketch" is almost the wrong word for this, given how detailed and polished they are.
And then we basically play Mr. Potato Head with them! If you're not familiar with that reference, it's a kid's toy where you can snap on different mouths, eyes, noses, and so forth; well, we do more or less the same thing here. Avery takes a range of different runs at the concept so that Alyc and I can select what features we like best from each one: the face shape from here, the hair from there, etc.
As you can imagine, this gets labor-intensive! But Avery insists it's the approach she's happiest with, and for us, it's a delight to see all the different variants. We wind up thinking a lot about small details and what vibe we want each card to have. In this case, for The Face of Stars, you can see that some of the variants look kind of ominous, which we decided wasn't right for the card that signifies good fortune -- though part of that vibe came from the dark backgrounds many of them have, which the finished card won't have. (All Faces and Masks will have the light, neutral background you can see on the existing card for The Mask of Mirrors.) In the end, our Mr. Potato Head fiddling leaned mostly on variant #1, with a bit of the hair from #3, resulting in this:
. . . and that's still just a sketch! Avery will be executing this in color for the final, with the "blind contour" technique mentioned back when we did the artist interviews. But it's absolutely gorgeous, and a great sample of what you can expect from the rest of these cards.
I'll have another example for you in a few weeks!
--Marie
Preview: The Hidden Eye!
12 months ago
– Tue, Dec 05, 2023 at 12:34:24 PM
Before I get to this update's card preview, a quick plug: there's a Story Bundle running right now on the theme of "Assassins and Rogues," which contains a contribution from yours truly! There are ten items in the full bundle, but it's actually more than that; mine is an omnibus of all the works in the Doppelganger duology (my first two novels Warrior and Witch, and the prequel novella Dancing the Warrior), and K.J. Heritage has also provided an omnibus, so you get a total of fifteen works for whatever amount you choose to pay.
As is usual for these things, we've also chosen a charity for the bundle: you can optionally choose to donate 10% to Mighty Writers, an organization helping kids learn to write better (a cause near and dear to my heart!). So if this sounds at all like your cup of tea, check it out!
The Hidden Eye
The Kiraly clan card is one we didn't have a very distinct image for at the outset. We knew it should include a raccoon, since it's their clan animal, and we knew it should suggest their virtues and vices (glossed in the brief writeup as "clever, dexterous, confident, mischievous, secretive, covetous"). But how it might do that? No idea.
This wound up being a rare example of a card where we went back to the drawing board after the initial sketch. Here's what A.C. sent in at first:
This just didn't click for us the way their other sketches had. There's nothing overtly wrong with it -- the finished painting would be perfectly fine -- but for an oracle deck, you really want the image to immediately evoke its significance, and this didn't feel like it was doing that as powerfully as many of the others.
We went through all the card sketches during a video chat, getting clarifications of images I couldn't parse as well (I don't speak fluent Rough Thumbnail) and suggesting tweaks, and this one led to a whole conversation. What we wound up with . . . well, I'll just show you:
Somewhere during that conversation, one of us said "raccoon as cartoon burglar," and boom, we had our design. This makes us giggle when we look at it, which brings in the sense of fun we didn't know we wanted until we arrived at this idea. We're delighted with the result!
Until next time . . . which will probably be in 2024! In general I'm trying to send out previews every two weeks, but since I'm also trying to take some time off around the holidays, the next missive likely won't come until January. At which point I'll be back with a peek at how Avery is approaching work on the Faces and the Masks!
--Marie
Preview: Turtle in Her Shell!
about 1 year ago
– Tue, Nov 21, 2023 at 06:38:00 PM
Greetings from the Dragonsteel Convention, which I would have mentioned last time that I'm attending if my brain weren't still recovering from being turned into Swiss cheese! I have time to kill before my godawful red-eye flight, and it's time for another sneak preview, so here we go.
This is an example of a card that got tweaked from the original sketch. To be clear, this is in no way an indicator that the artist "screwed up" or anything like that; this is a normal part of the process (literally written into the contract, in fact). Our sense of what a given card should look like was often extremely nebulous -- sometimes it consisted of little more than the name and the significance, and whatever those implied -- so there's a certain amount of "ooh, let's refine in this direction" or "hmmm, this one doesn't feel like it's hit the mark yet."
In the case of Turtle in Her Shell (a card from the cut thread, which signifies protection and safety), we adored the turtle A.C. drew:
Isn't she adorable??? But as I looked at this one, I felt the sense of threat coming from the raptor grabbing the turtle's shell was too ominous. I can totally see why A.C. included it -- "protection" is highlighted if something is attacking -- but in my head, the turtle's about to be picked up and dropped from a great height so the raptor can snack upon her at leisure. Doesn't feel very protected to me.
So after discussing it with Alyc and A.C., here's what we wound up with for the revision:
Still adorable! Now, however, she's being threatened by nothing worse than a rainstorm. It's a cozier vibe -- which certainly won't suit every interpretation this card might have, but it felt like the right look to me. And, per what I said last time about repeated motifs here, if this card appears in a layout with Storm Against Stone (the card of force), they might play off each other to suggest a greater threat. I can't wait to see the final version!
Until next time . . .
--Marie
Preview: The Silent Witness!
about 1 year ago
– Tue, Nov 07, 2023 at 05:41:11 PM
Work continues apace on the deck art! And as promised, we're going to help tide you over during the long wait for the completed deck by giving you previews of the cards. Last time we shared Warp and Weft; this time, we'll take a look at one of the clan cards, The Silent Witness:
You may recall from A.C.'s interview during the campaign that they love drawing birds, so here we get a trio of absolutely fantastic owls.
You'll also note the moon up in the corner, which gives me a chance to mention one of the interesting things we're playing with in the deck design: repeated motifs. We actually meant for these to be a noteworthy thing in pattern interpretation, but in writing the novels, that idea ran aground on the fact that we didn't have actual card images in front of us; it wasn't really possible for Ren to instinctively know that two cards in different positions were connected because her eye was drawn to repeated elements shared between them. Or rather, it would have been possible if we fully detailed what each card looked like, down to the small motifs -- but that would have been difficult, and furthermore would have seriously constrained any future artist (and we knew we really really wanted to crowdfund the deck eventually). So we left it vague, and instead, any future Vraszenian stories might reference those kinds of details!
