Narwen Illustrations

Freelancer Illustrator 📩 [email protected]

[7narwen]

Part of the Continent map for Witcher book series + drafts Was made for © AST Publisher More about reconstruction: https://dtf.ru/witcher/4029953-kartografiya-mira-vedmaka

[7narwen]

A very, very long time ago, back in school, I read "Volkodav" and "Valkyrie" by Maria Semyonova, and I was absolutely delighted. Twenty years later I was called to draw a map for another novel by this author. "Shadow from the North" is Slavic fantasy with elements of Karelian-Finnish and Nordic mythology written by Maria Semenova and Anna Gurova.

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My map for Russian edition of «Anathem» by Neal Stephenson. More references and details on my behance.

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My map for Russian edition of Age of Ash (The Kithamar Trilogy) by Daniel Abraham:

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Map for Russian edition of All the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay

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Map for Russian edition of «The First Binding» by R.R. Virdi.

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Map for Russian edition of «Of Blood and Fire» by Ryan Cahill.

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Get my copy of Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang with my maps on endpapers.

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Just playing with localization. Not official.

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The Russian publisher Fanzon asked me to draw a map for the novel The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin. Although the action of the book is set in modern, albeit fantastic, New York, a stock plan of the city with a couple of plot marks will not work: the text will become unreadable when printed on the front endpapers, and the excessive number of captions will prevent the map from fulfilling its main function of orientation in the text. So the map needs to be justifiably simplified.

The designer of the original map came up with a nifty solution. The original diegetic map exists in the world of the book, the characters themselves sloppily scribbled only important locations. Using this idea, I drew two versions of the map: the first one is filled in partially with one hand, looking fresher and simpler, while the second one is full and reflects the progression of the story. This also solves utilitarian problem: in the Russian version, the length of the captions is much longer due to the impossibility of using familiar abbreviations, so simple version is more demonstrative.

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Russian edition of Gunmetal Gods: Conqueror's Blood by Zamil Akhtar is here, and I've made map for endpaper of this book. In the Russian edition, the map for the first novel in the series was drawn by another artist, while I was called in for the second novel, so it was necessary to maintain visual unity between the maps (not too fanatically, though). Communication with the author is often possible only through editors, but in this case I could find him in social media and so many thanks to Zamil Akhtar for clarifying a few details in his map!

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My old tribute to abandoned Ghost from ASOIAF/Game of Thrones

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Sooooo, Russian edition of Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang is almost here, and I've made maps for endpaper of this book. More about this project on my behance.

Color tests:

This was my first attempt with such plans, so I heavily used map of Oxford by Spencer Hoffman (1929) in many aspect, and Google Earth 3D for understanding how historical building is looks like. Some of my references and inspirations:

Upd: Publisher show video with book! 😍

[7narwen]

In "The Last Watch" film about final season of Game of Thrones saw crew jacket with direwolf. This Jacket was done in 2016 year for Dragon (???) Unit. And you know what? They've draw something very similar to my old art of wolf amoung tree replacing head to Stark sigil. Still feel strange.

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Testing modern map style. Fully vector.

Notation is based on maps from Russian books: 1) Словарь античности. Пер. с нем. — М.: Прогресс, 1989 2) «Всемирная история», т. II. М.: Госполитиздат, 1956 г. 3) Роберт Грейвз. Мифы Древней Греции. Пер. с англ. — М.: Прогресс, 1992

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Some of my updated old Game of Thrones art. Original versions is on 7kingdoms.ru

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Some of my old designs of Targaryen's coat of arm.