Jenna Moran

Nobilis 3rd Edition Rerelease

Added 2022-03-03 22:15:08 +0000 UTC

It's not quite there, but I thought I'd share the art I'd put together for it. (Not counting two pieces I kept from the original book, one unchanged and one that the artist touched up.)

"Beware! the poison of a wood-witch sting! Debilitating within 72 hours; fatal, within a week; and unacknowledged in its entirety by modern medicine, its only redeeming feature is the crowds of cheerful woodland creatures it will attract to you, to help you with both your chores and finding love (until you die).*

* ProTip! This can also be a symptom of anxiety."

Adapted from a "Orpheus Charming the Animals," by Josias Murer II, courtesy of the Getty Museum.

"In the Mythic World you can get practically anywhere by road. There is a path to death, and back. There's a road up to the sun."

Adapted from "View of the Mountain of La Verna from the Road of Casentino (Vue de la montagne della Vernia...) [plate A]," by Jacopo Ligozzi (designer), Raffaello Schiaminossi (etcher), for a work by Lino Moroni (author), courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

"The Aaron's Serpents are the children of the Ash ..."

I tweaked a couple of things, but this one is really more clipped from the original piece than converted or adapted; regardless, it's from "Tiger and Snake," by Eugène Delacroix, courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

So my first take on Tiria of the Borealis was:

based on Frederick Edwin Church's "Aurora Borealis," courtesy of the Smithsonian, and a character from Gustave Caillebotte's "Paris Street, Rainy Day," courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.

I couldn't really ... make it good, though.

Part of that was ... like ... I'd actually seen the borealis once, and ... nothing online, no visual resource anywhere, looked at all like what I remembered.

Part of it was just ... I dunno.

I'd done all that, above, and it had come out kind of flat!

Ultimately I decided I had to actually draw something myself.

"This is Tiria, the Power of the Borealis! She lives in Locus Zaanannim, the original reality from which television characters arise. It's one of her duties to infuse some characters and shows with a sense of outward-looking wonder, which is why she's cool, but also, shines!"

(JENNA INTERRUPT! This image is on the page opposite the Cool/Shine rules. To be clear.)

"If you can ride a plane or space shuttle into the borealis and ask her to, she will make you the star of your own series, but at the cost of being fictional thenceforth. If her picture seems familiar to you then she probably hung out with you when you were a child; she is fond of seizing young children with the tendrils of the borealis and playing with them in the sky or among the shows, usually remembering to return them before their parents notice they have gone."

"Mt. Everest rears over the Mythic World in the form of a mantis, its claws hooked into the sky. If you want to know why, the Power of Mountains can ask; it’s just a difficulty 2 “conversation”-type miracle."

(JENNA INTER^H^H^H^H POSTSCRIPT! You will never guess which miracle type is on the opposite page!)

Adapted from an illustration for George Shaw's "Vivarium Naturae or the Naturalist's Miscellany," by Frederick Polydore Nodder, courtesy of the NYPL collection, and the photograph "The North-East Arete of Mount Everest," by Alexander Frederick Richmond "Sandy" Wollaston, courtesy of the Getty.

"Diane Spinnaker! She can use any picture of herself as a mystic link.
Even this one!^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
After studying the relevant laws on the Internet I have decided to say
“except for this one, obviously.”"

Adapted from "Elaine," by Julia Margaret Cameron, courtesy of the Met.

Locus Araunah! My original try at this piece was:

and you can see how I might have gotten there!

At the time I made this, I wasn't confident enough to just draw my own stuff yet, but there aren't many definitively "this is Argentina" backgrounds to work with that aren't also "this is Argentina, not made into a Chancel." I can't just pick a Buenos Aires street, because one thing that people who live in or have been to Buenos Aires might know is that it has not been turned into a Chancel full of dryads and elves. (At the very least, if it has, I would like to think even in the 2020s it would have appeared on the news.)

So I went with something based on "Rendering of the Grand Gallery of Honor, Palazzo Paz, Buenos Aires, Argentina," courtesy of the Smithsonian, on the theory that yes, that is a specific place in Argentina, but! It is also the kind of specific place that depressed and nihilistic nouveau pseudo-nobility trapped in a Chancel might try to emulate in their own home to feel better about things.

Then ...

I swapped out the view through the door for a piece by Rackham (courtesy of the NYPL collection), which would have been fine if it hadn't come out so flat and been unfixable with a pure photomanip/image manip style, and added some characters (a dryad magic teacher and a human, also from Rackham, also courtesy of the NYPL collection), and OK, cool, but ...

Well ...

As you can see, even with my attempts to like do something interesting with her hair blurring into shadow or whatever, it was unacceptable.

Fortunately by the time I got back to this and the hopeless task of editing/fixing it, I had picked up enough confidence that the idea of just drawing my own image instead was intimidating instead of impossible.

My original idea started with a photo by Fachy Marin on Unsplash:

https://unsplash.com/photos/oGl8uWAwi4o

which has the advantage of being literally from Argentina, but not Buenos Aires like 99% of the pictures online, and looking kind of like the vaguely industrial place I wanted Locus Araunah to be. (I know ship stuff isn't really industrial, but ...)

I figured I'd lay it out like:

Dryad teacher and human, like in the picture above.

I watched some "Ross Draws" stuff, since the first bootcamp video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUc6mC2f1xA ) had been a helpful orientation in general. In particular, a lot of my early thinking on this was shaped by his video on landscapes ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKXkTDSvb1k&list=PLfZKSEMcBg3WLcxY5nbNMB4K2rqG6c9cv&index=5 ).

I dug into the grass in the original image and built a texture that I never used because it was terrible:

(I'm actually kind of proud of it, but it turns out that you just can't have that much blank/black space in your grass texture)

Started building some details:

I figured out what I thought was going to be a decent foreground, middleground, background.

I figured out that I wanted a kind of tree made of metal and smoke aesthetic for the triangular spire thing. I'm not sure whether it's part of a ship or some kind of crane thingie in the original picture but it gave me a direction to go with turning the miscellaneous pieces of stuff in the original image into something useful.

However, I soon had the realization that the text box was way too big for my original design.

Like ...

It just consumed the planned foreground.

I think that if I were better I could probably have gone with the original plan. You can see the original layout sketch. It's right there, above. It sort of works. Just ...

I didn't feel quite good enough to build the characters fully in the space I had without expanding them to cover the midground and background.

My solution was to bump them upwards, put them on a balcony or something. Maybe a broken balcony, like someone had fallen, twisting the railing outwards:

I figured that I'd do two of the tree/smoke things, since I really liked them. I'd reverse the background for design reasons, and I'd try to make that spire thing sticking out at the end of the background that was a boat's front end in the original picture a COTO sign kind of leaning on its side after the enChancellment apocalypse, as it were, instead. (This never worked out, it was always too forced, particularly given that I'd have had to disguise it to avoid possible legal fights.) I'd put the human in Victorian mourning dress because, like, someone fell through the balcony, and bam: there it was.

Here's a slightly cleaner layout, arguably:

And some more stuff, with early ideas for everything:

I concluded that I definitely needed more figure understanding so I worked my way through some of Proko's ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClM2LuQ1q5WEc23462tQzBg ) stuff on the subject, ultimately giving us:

You may also notice a couple of other things, like: she's wearing pants now. Why?

Apparently everybody in Argentina wears pants, like, even when you'd expect a skirt or dress: pants. Now, this could be dated information, it could be an inaccurate impression from a random tourist blog, but:

It's what I had.

And I'd failed at including COTO, and I'd failed at including a street I could put some other Argentinian business on, and I'd failed at most of my attempts at including Argentinian flora (although the dryad and the details on the girl's eventual clothing have some hints of it.)

So, pants.

This kind of screwed with my idea for Victorian mourning dress, but, whatever. Victorian mourning jeans. Those probably would have existed if a market for them had appeared!

The table and flower have been replaced with a more suspiciously structural thing. That's because the longer I looked at the basic picture the more it felt like they weren't on a balcony at all:

They were climbing some sort of outside stair.

And if they were climbing an outside stair, then, the flower wouldn't be on a table, it'd be on an island thingie in the spiral.

Unfortunately Argentina's national flower is a tree flower so I couldn't put it on the table and I couldn't put it on the stair island either. I tried putting it on the ground, but as you'll see later that won't work very well.

Side note: Pretty happy with the dryad concept design tbh!

I worked on the land structure for a while, as you can see above, trying to figure out what it looked like under the weird tree things. Eventually I figured out that the land was a bunch of small separate little islands with grass as you see there, because the tree things are not just trees and metal/smoke things (and apparently now also a bridge that has been burned/broken by the dragon?) but also swaying buoys.

I mean ...

In world they are probably just a bridge that has been burned/broken with maybe the tree association mattering somehow. But visually, they are swaying buoys, because I grew up in Santa Barbara, you see.

So.

It's getting hard to figure out which layers of this document came in which order, so I will just jump to "long story short:"

Next up, there is the Heartstone of the World:

I'm pretty happy with this one! Built up from "Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower, 1838," by Thomas Cole, courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, and a Mayan jade earflare, courtesy of the Met. The writing all over the stone is, however, not Mayan but my vague go at True God writing. Lots and lots and lots of True God writing.

While all the actual beauty here comes from Thomas Cole and the Mayan sculptor who made the ear flare, I'm still quite pleased with the part I did too. ^_^

Next is an Excrucian piece. I'm not going to share it here, it was in Glitch 0th too. If you missed it there, when Nob3 rereleases you can see it again. ^_^

This one comes opposite the rules for flurries! It's a picture of Cardiff.

"I am, kind of, having to guess? that there is something sort of flurry-like about the Cardiff Actual? (depicted, May 18, 2004), since I don't have that rare brain thing that lets you actually spot it in the image. *^_^*;; It's probably like a blue dress/gold dress sort of deal?"

So many credits!

This one is mostly adapted from "Saint Thecla Praying for the Plague-Stricken," by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, courtesy of the Met; but also from, courtesy of the Smithsonian: "Justice," by Albrecht Dürer; "Studies of Cows," by Samuel Colman; "Religion," by Angelika Kaufmann; "Woman Shielding Her Eyes," by Daniel Huntington: "James McNeill Whistler," by Alice Pike Barney; "Portrait, possibly Elizabeth Vail," by J. Carroll Beckwith; and "Le Doge Loredan," by Paul-Edme Lerat.

It could probably use more editing, to be honest---it's not that far changed from the version I did back in January when I was a young and foolish child.

I wanted to go over it much more thoroughly!

Unfortunately not long after finishing Locus Araunah my arm decided to go on strike and start dropping the pen concerningly if I draw for more than ten minutes, so I just fixed the really dumb stuff and will handwave the rest as "I can't actually see what's happening in the image anyway." ^_^

"The swords of the Byzantine Society (commonly understood to be a gathering-ground for Nobilis of social Estates, Excrucian spies, and all manner of elliptical, uncertain, indirect, and convoluted characters) are riddles, innuendoes, secrets, lies, and even entire social contexts… forged to steel."

Images on the swords adapted from "The Market," by an unknown artist, courtesy of the Getty; "the Song of the Lark," by Jules Breton, courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago; and "Both Members of This Club," by George Bellows, courtesy of the National Gallery of Art. I also used sword references, courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.

I would probably have done more cleanup on this one too were my arm still working but I'm honestly fairly pleased with it even so.

Lastly, the cover! I'm hoping that my arm will get better by the time the last error-checks are in and I'll be able to repaint it entirely now that I know more in general! But, for now, it's