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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Edward Kann@StoryART" data-source="post: 1725388" data-attributes="member: 23128">Art and ProseThank you to everyone who has kindly responded to our posting so far.Artwork:There are four pieces of artwork from our fantasy project in my signature if it is visible.  Website construction may cause it to flicker in and out today. Realistic black and white artwork and fairly realistic color pieces are what we are looking for, although the number of color pieces we can afford at this point in the game are fairly limited.I love anime but we won't be doing anything in an anime style or with an anime look.  Not even a little bit.  Sorry anime fans we'll try and catch up with you awesome artists on other projects.For both of our book lines we are approaching layout and style in a more "making of the film book" or comic style but with a realistic tone to the artwork.  When we talk about showing a pan of the city from the air we want images that are more like storyboards for pre-location work in a film or storyboard work for a graphic novel.  A fair amount of panel work and illustrations that are often tied directly into the unfolding story.Fantasy Illustrations InfluencesJohn Howe - location illustrations for the LOTR film.  Style not content.  What we are producing has zero in common with LOTR except that it is a fantasy genre story line and setting.Alan Lee- LOTR making of books again. sketchwork styles for realistic line artwork for locations and equipment.Michael Kaluta - the Studio works, covers and associated material from his vast and most excellent portfolio.Edgar Rice Burroughs - illustrations and covers from Argosy All Story Weekly and other similar works.In working on the books we have an approach that is a bit work intensive.  Not sure how many groups pour hours into the little details, if you all approach your campaign and adventure books like this then you have my sympathy.  For example:  We want to include iconic religious statues and monuments into our background and location artwork and so Samantha, Tony and I might invest many dozens of hours creating the fictional art history of our world.  How did religious icons and statues evolve, what were the figures, what cultures used them, how does the city layer itself over time so that it includes old temples of the imperial cults that have been adapted into bascilicas for the holy orders and the saints, who are the saints, what symbols are included in their icons and how do their statues look?  Phew, how is that for a run on sentence?  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />    I think I've invested something like fifty or seventy hours of work just into pouring over books of statues and religious icons to help in working up our own fantasy art history.Doing it like this is hard work but in the end feels very rewarding.  The setting and story line, probably not to everyone, but from my point of view are so inspirational that they ~demand~ nothing less than my absolute full attention and best work every single day.Writers of InspirationWe don't expect everyone we work with to be a master author.  Heck, we are new at this ourselves in many ways despite having written and worked on games now for fun for 30 years.  But we do have some guiding lights that inspire us and make us want to achieve great things in our prose.Fritz LeiberPhilip K. DickIsaac Asimov..to be honest the list of writers that inspire me in novels and comics would probably fill such a huge page that it is not really productive to go into that.Lets see, for writing projects we are looking for writers to take a rough draft of a chapter or adventure and make it really sing.  So the process will generally be; we send a writer a chapter that they are enthusiastic to invest themselves in of rough material with some basic skeleton for layout and even some roughs for art and maps to refer to and cut the writer loose to turn it into something worthy of the story and the world as final product.  That means writing narrative scenes, dialogue for story pieces that are read to the players of scenes that are important to the plot but happen "off camera" from the player characters, etc..We have some pretty great idea people here but the idea people understand that making a great project requires the talents of several people, all playing to their strengths.  I can write reasonably well and with editing could probably put out some pretty good .pdf work.  Even so I believe the material will be stronger and that the body of work that we present in a finished product will benefit greatly by having several sets of eyes looking them over and adding inspiration.The setting and the potential for the stories and characters really demands some excellent work.  Even more important the game masters and players that purchase our books deserve to get the very best work that we can possibly produce.  These books are not us practicing at doing good work.  They are in every way going to be our very, very, very, best attempts at producing our own personal masterpieces to share with our audience.  That is the very least we can do for customers kind enough to buy our books and spend their own valuable time reading our stories....or my really long winded forum postings... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> As you can see I need an editor in the worst way, one that I can carry stapled to my keyboard at all times. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/nervous.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":heh:" title="Nervous Laugh    :heh:" data-shortname=":heh:" /> Btw:We are doing a lot of website hammering and sawing this week so I apologize if my banner signature blinks in and out occasionally.  I will try to keep an eye on it.  If you can see the banner you can get a little bit of an idea of our artistic flavor for the fantasy books, at least in part.Great to be finally talking about some of this but now its time to get my mind back onto making books.  I'll check back in tomorrow to follow up and answer any questions that I can for those who are curious.Once again.  Thank you everyone who has sent us interest.  The enthusiasm and support from the community here is really outstanding and encouraging.Onward!Edward KannStoryART Games</blockquote>

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