Shalvar's Refusal: An Illustration From The Lay of Merialeth
Behind-the-Scenes: An Illustration for the Brothers Krynn's Epic Poem
I’m honored to have been able to create this piece as a volunteer-work for
, a scene from the beautiful epic poem, The Lay of Merialeth. Today you’ll see the illustration in full resolution, while for many of my works I’ve gone back to using the lower resolution of screenshots.Drawing on classical traditions, The Lay of Merialeth follows the tale of Merialeth, a beautiful African elf who falls in love with the Greek who rescues her. I highly recommend that you read it! The Brothers Krynn have now posted up through Book III, with more to come, so I’ve left the links below:
Book 1: The Lay of Merialeth - An Earth-Elven Love Song
Book 2: The Black Shores of Kisiyuka
Depicting a scene of Merialeth, the Greek Argyros, and Merialeth’s father, King Shalvar, this is one of the most detailed, and one of the few, full-color illustrations I’ve created. Most often my full-color pieces are cover artworks I’ve completed, or smaller sketches, so this was both a change of pace and a bit of a challenge!
I’ve also never painted a darker skin tone (or drawn a Greek nose, or a leopard skin, or a tapestry, or a river delta. . . ) so this was a welcome experiment.
The first step was costume design: not much to say here, so I’ll just share the sketches.
For Merialeth, I originally drew the first two dresses, and we settled on a combination of the two.
Below is the sketch of the full illustration before I began coloring. One of my hacks is to copy-paste sections of detailing so that they’re a bit more uniform and may save time. I did this with the upper border, as well as the designs between the arches. I need to consider doing this after I color the details, though, to help with uniformity.
Later on, I extended the right edge of the image so that Shalvar wouldn’t be cut off. I also dropped the narrow tapestry running around the room.
Originally I thought of using some of these stylized florals I drew from various plants in the Congo rainforests - rosy periwinkle, wild ginger, Aerangis Gracillima, and a species of orchid - but thought it might become an overly busy design. I'm always happy to have unused sketches and details on hand, though, and I’m sure I’m going to use these somewhere else.
As with the Substack cover art for Wingswept, I chose to go with a softened background, more watercolor than detail. One of my tricks for getting closer to accurate coloring is to pull from public domain or CC0 photos from Pixabay; I’ll place them into a document and pull out the most significant colors, all the shades, and all of the highlights.
For instance, something like this:
I recreated this for this post, as I unfortunately deleted the original reference doc earlier before I thought to use it. These are some of the photos I used, though as you can tell, I didn’t use all of the colors; plus I’ll often get more than one reference photo for each object. I had multiple for the jungle, two for leopards, two for the ocean. In these cases, I pull colors from each and pick from both sets. Clearly I chose a brighter tawny shade from the second leopard photo which isn’t shown. The sea is also a much brighter blue, which was in neither of the ocean photos, as colors tend to evolve during the process.
That’s about as much as I can say about the behind-the-scenes! I enjoyed all the new techniques and tips I had to discover, as well as the new elements I had to experiment with. I’m looking forward to creating more illustrations for this epic poem in the future!
If you’re a writer here on Substack, or are otherwise looking for logos, wordmarks, decorative page breakers, illustrations, or cover art, let me know!
In some cases I’m happy to volunteer, as with
, as a thank-you for all the support they give to other authors and artists. Most other instances will be by commission; I was reminded that I haven’t yet posted my commission fees over on my about page, so I’m adding a PDF to reference. That said, if it’s out of your budget but you still want to reach out, I’m happy to negotiate.For privacy, I don’t use DM’s, but I have a separate email address where you can reach me if you have a project you want to discuss.
Contact: stellamarisdesigns.trimmer962@passinbox.com.
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