Hi folks. Been hard at work on The Unfamiliars, but I recently finished up a section I wanted to share. It's one of the most detailed pages I've done to date, and the finished piece is the image at the top of the page here. It's a prison for familiars and other criminals in the book and this full page image establishes the scale of the place.

My first crack at designing the interior of The Rook was this thumbnail, which worked as a placeholder while I was working out layouts but I knew I would need to come up with something showing a grander sort of scale when I came back to it.

There's no real perspective here, but you can see I had the idea of a bee-hive like, organic shaped thing. When I went back and sketched it again I really tried to force perspective more and made the cells smaller.

Ok, getting there. This definitely felt bigger. I kinda cheated a bit and made the thing like an x-ray vision into the building, or maybe peering in through an opening, looking down. The ropes help bringing your eyes to the right spots and with establishing some more perspective. I started to ink to get a feel for how I wanted the line weights.

Without getting too fiddly with the inks, I just wanted to lay down where the thickness needed to be. Those foreground outcrops are right, some of the other stuff is off still.

Next I started sketching out the inmates, and I ended up putting a few little easter eggs in there.

All told this thing took me several weeks to work out, which is crazy for me, since I tend to average a page every day or two, but I think it came out pretty cool and should make for a really nice full pager in the book!

While this was all going on, I also commissioned my friend Sid Moncrief to do a cover for the book and I have to say she absolutely nailed it. I am still fiddling with the graphic design but look at how cool this is!