For my final project, I decided to finalize and illustrate my long-time personal project, a book of over 190 000 words, titled The heir of Hatti. I started writing the book almost 5 years ago, but it was continuously put on hold because of school, work etc., so when I first heard about the final project for this school, I knew that this is what I was going for.
The book itself is a historical adventure and romance-drama, and from the beginning I tried to be historically accurate with a bit of a fantastical touch. For this historical accuracy I put long years of research into the project, which was a great advantage when I started the illustrations in March, since more or less every source I needed was already at my disposal. I already had all my handmade character sheets, character designs, costume designs, and I even made maps to help with the locations in the story.
After all this, the scenes were already in my head, I just needed to find a way to visualize it in a coherent manner. My original idea was to have at least one illustration per chapter, but I soon realised that it would be impossible to do everything I wanted in only two months, so I cut out a lot of my original ideas but plan to work on it this summer and finish everything I wanted for later publishing. It was a great experience to learn to design the illustrations to fit the text, the content, the layout, and all the little details that make an idea into a real book.
Working on this really helped to put everything I learned in this school into place, and see the big picture instead of just small individual drawings in a book.
