Practice and Research - Exercise 3.4: Layout & Spot Illustrations

Writing and Layout

The first thing that needed to be created was the text itself. Using the existing campaign frames as guides, I went to work on creating my setting, iterating and getting feedback from friends. Some parts come easier than others, so rather than getting too bogged down, for areas that needed more thought, I added placeholder 'lorem ipsum' text that roughly equated the word count of the same sections in other frames.

I first worked in a Google Doc, but once I had iterated a few times, I moved the text into Affinity Publisher to see how it sat on the pages, and it allowed me to get my first idea of where illustrations would complement the text and layout. I added image placeholders so the text could be arranged around something 'solid'.

Planning the Illustrations

In my sketchbook, I made a note of the dimensions of those placeholders, which then gave me a list of the illustrations I would need to create for the brief. I also used this opportunity to use my sketchbook to play around with some ideas for the larger illustrations and did some character design to experiment with how I might combine the different fantastical ancestries with the 18th-century aesthetic.

Spot Illustrations

One of the interesting design choices made by the Daggerheart creators is the choice to use pencil sketch-like illustrations for many of the spot illustrations throughout the book, and their larger illustrations are then rendered with a more painterly approach.

Each of the spot illustrations that I needed to create needed to fit into the setting, as well as (where appropriate) link to the context of the text. For each of these pencil spot illustrations, I worked quickly on rough thumbnails to explore ideas, and then used a combination of reference and photo-bashed composites to create the compositions for each of them.

Then, working digitally using pencil brushes, I worked on the pencil illustrations.

While they don't fit the drawing style exactly of the main rulebook, I was extremely pleased with these images. I used lots of reference photos of clothing and armour from the time period, and then had to work out how to convert many of them to fit with fantasy ancestries, without it looking too cartoony. Working at this level of detail in pencil is not my usual approach, so I was pleased by the variation and quality of mark-making I was able to use for the image. I then placed these spot illustrations into the document, so I could start to see how they would work.

Seeing them in place, I was really happy and enthused to continue with the colour illustrations. However, this is where things started to unravel.