The Blog of the Empire - Page 20

I’ve self-bound the first four books of the series. It was a fun, creative process in which I learned about book-binding and experimented with different mediums. After the first four were done, I took a pause…why…well, I was busy so that was part of it. But it was also because I was debating on how to experiment further with making creative, artistic copies of the Primordial Essences Saga books. They concern four iconic artifacts…four artifacts that I wanted to model...

Yes, I’ve done various videos of me pronouncing character and race names, which I hope are helpful. However, this post is more of a condensed overview for people who have issues with the names or just want something quick to look at so they can mentally match up groups/people with their actual names. So more like a reference document to map names with groups than about the people themselves. For me personally in other fandoms, I’ve conflated characters with similar...

Has it really been five years? It really has been. I can’t fathom it and yet at the same time, now, at the near end of this major arc with Emerald Haze, the years seem far too apt. It has been a long while since I first scrappily put out How to Stop Wildfire. That was a major accomplishment for myself. It was so small in a way, and yet, it was massive. It was the foundation of all that...

After mulling over the top fractals I recently generated, the rejects you can see here, I settled on one fractal to use. It was the fractal that I deep-down knew was going to be the Emerald Haze cover art the moment I saw it generate. Any hesitation I had towards using the fractal medium once more for a book cover was shattered by this fractal. This fractal…its entire composition is so apt for the book contents. It is almost like...

I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted for the Emerald Haze cover art, but I knew it had to be green. I played around with the Apple Pencil and the Sketchbook app, but I wasn’t too fond of the above results (the art is the post thumbnail). It lacked punch and texture. It needed something more dynamic to convey the themes present in the book. After some thought, I decided to spin up the JWildfire Fractal Generator again. I used...

Since the commission of Marcus and Jessica went so well, I did another commission with the artist Reiesu. This character choice was none other than Princess Nefertiti Magayak of Magaya. I commissioned a portrait of her plus a colored background (flames!). This commission process was fundamentally different than with Marcus and Jessica’s commission because I had actually drawn Nefertiti a few times in the recent and long ago past…very few times. But I had more of an idea of what...