Earlier this year I illustrated the inside of the Deluxe Edition of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells for Wraithmarked Creative. Creative direction by Daniel Greene.
One of the briefs included a quotation from the book, describing the Martians in a rather academic, dry fashion - contrasted with a peculiar curiosity mixed with anxiety among the observers. Due to the duality of the scene's contents, I was given a choice to either focus on the people, or the Martians.
They were, I now saw, the most unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive. They were huge round bodies - or, rather, heads - about four feet in diameter, each body having in front of it a face. This face had no nostrils - indeed, the Martians do not seem to have had any sense of smell, but it had a pair of very large dark-coloured eyes, and just beneath this a kind of fleshy beak. In the back of this head or body - I scarcely know how to speak of it - was the single tight tympanic surface, since known to be anatomically an ear, though it must have been almost useless in our dense air. In a group round the mouth were sixteen slender, almost whiplike tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight each. These bunches have since been named rather aptly, by that distinguished anatomist, Professor Howes, the hands.
The internal anatomy, I may remark here, as dissection has since shown, was almost equally simple. The greater part of the structure was the brain, sending enormous nerves to the eyes, ear, and tactile tentacles. Besides this were the bulky lungs, into which the mouth opened, and the heart and its vessels. The pulmonary distress caused by the denser atmosphere and greater gravitational attraction was only too evident in the convulsive movements of the outer skin.
Since my academic background lies in natural sciences, the decision was quick. I've studied illustrations in animal anatomy books for years, but despite working with pen and ink on a daily basis, I never really tried inking one myself - which made it a perfect occasion to clash those two worlds together.
Consequently, after gathering a decent amount of inspiration and reference imagery, I proceeded to planning the composition and preparing a small scale sketch, in order to communicate the layout and general idea I wanted to convey in my response to the excerpts from the book and guidelines from the creative director.
I aimed to create something resembling an era-appropriate medical illustration, historically most commonly drawn with pen and ink (and quite frequently with an addition of powdered graphite). Having in mind consistency with illustrations previously finished for this project I opted to add some stippling rather than limiting myself to linework and hatching - even though the latter would be more true to the main source of inspiration.
I chose to include three projections: a side view, the underside with internal organs and an anterior view with the whole body laid out flat - to show as much as I can on one page, while avoiding over-cluttering the composition.
The side view - and therefore the main visual characteristics of the creature - got rooted in a style test I've been assigned with prior to starting the work on this book. It wasn't as heavily researched at that stage but allowed me to build on it further:
Upon approval I proceeded to inking the anatomical concept piece in full scale:
I started with internal organs - to have an anchor point for remaining projections' positioning. I chose to ink the underside, as the top-down view would likely be mostly covered with brain, and showing some more structures could be a valuable point of interest for readers. I managed to include cerebral cortex on the top with eyes on optic nerves isolated on the sides; going lower into an incision through a serous membrane; opening up to a heart and vessels branching out on other organs; leading further down to lungs and trachea, suggesting where mouth is. Since the tympanic membrane is to be located on the back of the head it's not visible but I hinted nerves leading to it in the center, right by the asymmetrically positioned heart. Organs look and their distribution are a mixture between what we can see among cephalopods, aquatic reptiles and terrestrial mammals.
Next I proceeded to the side view I described briefly above already - and then the whole body on the side of the sheet, as a logical consequence of the parts already inked. I chose to draw half of the tentacles fully and hint the remaining half with dotwork to maintain the composition's balance - but also because I wanted to add some lettering in the bottom left corner and needed it to be readable.
Lettering had a separate thought process. Aside from the projection captions I needed to name the species. I didn't find any concrete information on that part - so I had to get creative.
Initially, I wanted to go for Homo martiensis sapiens but considering the species most likely isn't directly related to humans - and even if, people wouldn't want to openly admit the affiliation - I abandoned the idea, did some extra cephalopods research and leaned towards Martians' feeding habits as a plausible naming factor.
I eventually decided on Vampyroteuthis martiensis, as a nod to Vampyroteuthis infernalis - a vampire squid, discovered around the time the book's action takes place, so it would be reasonable to assume people would name the Martians in a similar manner.
Having decided on the textual contents, I took a rough scan of the anatomy study and mocked up text addition digitally. To limit the risk of smearing the ink on this clean background I'd normally combine those two files into one deliverable at this stage. However, as the publisher acquired the original (physical) piece as well, I wanted it to work as a whole in person too - additionally, having it done on paper limits potential discrepancies in lineweight and rendering accuracy.
Minimizing the chance of ruining the work I've already done I lightboxed properly sized text back on the paper.
The illustration got scanned, adjusted for output formatting in photoshop, vectorized in inkscape for more versatile scaling and prepared for printing in scribus.
Here's a link to the War of the Worlds book campaign if you fancy taking a peek.
