Epithet Illustrations + Sketches - [Batch 2]

Two more finished illustrations for the novelized Epithet Erased book. These are currently the illustrations for Chapters 2 and 7, but I think there's a good chance the numbering might change a bit.

I haven't been making as much progress on the book as I might like since finishing the 3rd draft and getting feedback from the copyeditors. I've been spending a lot of time dealing with bureaucratic stuff and travel (I'm taking another trip to New York next week in order to sell my car and submit my official, final immigration paperwork). I've also been doing a lot of work on Winds of Change. The support conversations document alone hit 100k words.

But anyways, Epithet.

The first illustration is for the new version of the Banzai Blasters vs. Molly + Indus fight. Originally this fight took place in the lobby. It now takes place in a new location in the museum called the "aero hall" which is a tribute to Tagia Country's history of aviation. A war between Taiga Country and Island Country is crucial to the new version of the story and it first gets mentioned here, so this illustration serves to show new readers a glimpse of what the Banzai Blasters look like and a little map of the world in the background.

We wanted a bunch of WWII-inspired propaganda posters in this exhibit, so Bo created a bunch of those and did a great job on them. I love that era of poster design.

Epithet's world doesn't actually use English text or any real existing language, so we used angular psuedo-text as the world language. You can make out a few English words here and there if you squint. One of them is total nonsense, though! Can you tell which one doesn't say anything?

There's also some cameos on the posters from characters who already have art in the TTRPG books. The 3rd poster in the first row is Feenie's mother, Phoenica "Tango" Fleecity who was involved in the war effort. Her family is somewhat famous so we figured it would track for her to pose for one of these in order to boost troop morale. She was a fighter pilot. She met Phoenica's father during this war because he was a mechanic who maintained her plane. This does not come up in the book I'm currently writing, I just know all the Feenie lore because I'm a parody of myself.

The poster to the right of Tango's is meant to be Regina Sandbag, Plaster's character from the original source material. I don't think this is going to come up anywhere, even in the books, but in this version of the world Regina is the president of Taiga Country. Her original incarnation was always giving motivational speeches and was kind of aggro so it makes some level of sense to me she'd be in charge of the country during wartime. She also has that cool eyepatch which makes for good propaganda imagery. Congratulations, President Sandbag.

The 3rd poster in the middle row is a reference to a character who has existed in Epithet's periphery for years. He's a weapons manufacturer. I have some ideas for him that might make for a cool side story at some point set during this war, but I already have so much in front of me that I'd be shocked if that ever actually happened. He's going to be an example boss enemy sheet in the TTRPG book at least. I've used his design as a placeholder for Phoenica's dad before in the past but they are, in fact, different characters and do not look the same. I am just lazy.

The other illustration present is for the Mera and Indus backstory chapter. I got some cool advice from Amy on how to restructure this chapter and I think that's going to be the biggest challenge of the rewrite, but this illustration will definitely still be in there.

It shows Mera and Indus during their training together. The bridge in the background is the New Tomorrow Bridge, a massive post-war construction project linking the capital cities of Taiga and Desert Countries. It's an important location in Mera's expanded backstory.

To help design this impossibly giant fantasy bridge, we asked our friend Miirshroom who works with bridges irl to give us some sketches. Those are on display above. Don't forget to click on the full-sized images for extra info in the captions!