Recently I had the pleasure to work on one of the legendary ghost stories writer Lafcadio Hearn. He wrote Japanese legends and ghost stories and he is great! 🙂 Here’s my cover for Russian edition of his stories.
All my links below will send you to whole books with big images. Don’t miss the bus! 😉
In this cover I used several sources to find proper reference. The first one is the book Samurai Commanders in two parts (the first one is about 940 – 1576 and the second 1577 – 1638) from Osprey Publishing. I love Osprey’s books. You can see there a lot of beautiful colour plates, which has been made by awesome Angus McBride, Richard Hook or Wayne Reynolds.
All Japanese warriors have very interesting and colored armors and suits. In my case I can’t use so many colored details or very uncommon things such as a helm with very long horns. I had to simplify all those details and decoration, therefrom I had to add some decoration on the kimono of the main character. I had to balance these features. So, we came to the second part of my sources of references. 🙂
The second source is about ornament. As you can see I drew an ornament on a kimono of the main character. For this very very simple ornament I used my favorite book Ornament of All Ages and Styles. This book actually on Russian, but I have the source book of my Russian edition, it’s the L’ornement polychrome released in Paris in 1888 under the editorship of Auguste Racinet and this is the real treasure!
Remember, those plates has a public access and if you choose one of these peaces, I suggest you to change it somehow: the colour or shape, something! You shouldn’t let these details such as ornament to coincide with details in a work of other artist.
As additional I want to share some of my interior illustrations which you can see in latest Paizo issues.
