Guild of Magic: Fortuna cover reveal
Plus a behind-the-scenes art process peek
One of the more exciting parts of being an author is working with great artists and designers to bring to life the world of the NYC Questing Guild series. Thanks to my first Kickstarter campaign, I was able to commission a boatload of amazing artwork, in addition to the cover, as you can see below.
With the Guild of Magic Kickstarter campaign on the horizon, it’s time to reveal the next piece of artwork. You may remember Siba Gasser from the final stretch goal that we didn’t quite hit during the first campaign. Well, Siba has been working on a whole set of illustrations for the next campaign for several months now and it is finally time to reveal one of them!
Welcome to the Den, the setting of Guild of Magic: Fortuna, an all-new short story that helps bridge the gap between books 1 and 2.
But before we go inside the Den, I wanted to do another deep-dive process post of the creation of Siba’s illustration.
Like with the Guild of Tokens cover, everything starts with the design brief:
A magical gambling den hidden under the Brooklyn Bridge.
There are actually old vaults in the supports of the Brooklyn Bridge that used to hold wine and champagne. In the book, one of the vaults has been repurposed as a gambling den. I've made the vault much bigger - think 30-feet high with a mezzanine level and a spiral staircase that goes down to the main floor.
There's a bar, lots of different tables with games that are alternate versions of blackjack, roulette, and craps, as well as regular poker. The patrons of the Den are dressed in cocktail attire.
To make it look more magical looking, there could be a floating chandelier or glowing orbs, pneumatic tubes snaking along the walls spitting out chips, banners on the walls with ancient glyphs, a cage with a mechanical singing bird, green vines snaking along the arches of the vault. These are just ideas and obviously there won’t be room for all of them in the piece.
Siba came back with some excellent follow-up questions, such as the type of clientele frequenting in the Den, to which I responded:
More of a high-class clientele but definitely some of them are shady characters. This is one of the few social scenes for the undergrounder Questers, so people come to have a night out and be with other Questers, but also some higher-stakes stuff at play here in terms of winning money and maybe rare items if bets get high enough.
Next, Siba drew a set of thumbnails to test out different ideas/concepts:
She then sent me the below series of sketches, along with her personal preference of which sketch she’d like to continue. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my parallel endeavor to become a comics writer, it’s to trust your artist, so I went with Siba’s suggestion (that also I happened to agree with).
Next, she added color and additional details, before sending the bottom image to me for more feedback.
My only feedback was to add a few more details for the lower tables, such as playing cards, so it’s more readily apparent that the location is a gambling den.
And with that, Siba arrived at the stunning illustration below, that will serve both as the cover of the Fortuna short story and as one of the three postcards in the New York Alchemy Tours postcard set that will be available in the Guild of Magic Kickstarter campaign!
That’s right, Siba has two more awesome illustrations that I’ll be revealing over the coming weeks, along with some incredible design work by Justine Bergman.
Stay tuned!
And last but not least, Guild of Magic: Fortuna is available to download below for paid Guild members.