This pair are two characters from Veil of the Gods. He is Namkia Nam and she is Zagger Shkeet. They're also our avatars, sculpted in 3D and ready to drop into whatever Metaverse will have them.
I'm having a lot of fun sculpting avatars.
To recruit a thousand soldiers is no great challenge. To find a general to lead them is far more difficult.
Veil of the Gods character study with the latest typeface I’ve been working on.
Inspiration.
Salamandrine Man In The Wastes (Illustrator Wayne Douglas Barlowe)
The process of creating a huge graphic novel like Veil of the Gods hasn’t just involved writing the story, sculpting the characters and preparing the digital artworks. I’ve also been creating typefaces. This was a hobby of mine 20 years or so ago. In 1996 I designed the font for my little book- The Moon on the Lake- published by Random House. Then I typeset the whole book with it. I mention this because it’s such a pleasure to have an excuse to build new typefaces. The graphic novel is full of them. Indeed these various typefaces are integral to the story… Here’s the proof page for two I finished today. They’re inspired by Tibetan scripts.
Latest Character sketch for Veil of the Gods.
The music I created for Veil of the Gods has been a wonderful journey in itself. You know, the long term plan is to transform the graphic novel into an interactive experience and an online game. So the music is very important. The track we used on the first two promo videos wasn’t the one I’d originally planned to include. This melody came to me in a daydream while I was trying to figure out a problem with a font. I picked up the low D whistle and the melody just burst out. I hadn’t actually played that instrument for about a year so I was really surprised. It was like the flute was just aching to be played again. The whole track took only a few hours to orchestrate, record and mix. And I’m pretty happy with the result. Here’s the short version without the flute.
My lastest piece listed as an NFT on Foundation
https://foundation.app/@Ziggetai/~/128586
Exhausted from another fourteen-hour shift, Yonani Khan sat back in her favourite armchair with a sigh. She only meant to rest her eyes for a moment, but she slipped into a deep, coma-like sleep straight away.
Yona rarely recalled her dreams. She joked, that there wasn’t anything worth remembering about them. This one, however, was different. She was walking along an inexplicably familiar hallway lit by piercing cyan. As much as it felt like home, she had no memory of the place and that startled her a little.
A large glass bubble enclosed her head and the air pumping into it was sweet. The scented freshness reminded her of the pristine mountain ranges that stand at the edge of the known world. Yona frowned.
How could that be? She’d never actually been anywhere near the southern continent. She’d never been out of the city. Her head was buzzing with questions. A little stab of anxiety fluttered her heartbeat. Somehow, she suppressed her confusion and determined to walk on without distraction. An instinct told her, that she could not afford to be late.
That first sleep-vision was the most straightforward one. After that her dreams got really, really interesting.
Inspiration.
Kitagawa Utamaro, Tying Thread, from the series “Women’s Handicrafts: Models of Dexterity" (“Fujin tewaza ayatsuri kagami”), 1792
Inspiration.
Honmon-ji Temple in Ikegami, Hasui Kawase, 1931
Mahjuti Glyph 999