The Ethuveraz, the lands of The Goblin Emperor
A few years ago, I read the wonderful fantasy novel The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison. This is a great book, filled with vivid characters, an intricate plot, and breathtaking world-building. It won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards.
As a fantasy cartographer, one of the things I always look for in a fantasy novel is the map. Unfortunately, there wasn’t one, but I realized that I was in a unique position to change that.
I reached out to the author and offered my services. She shared her original sketches, and over a series of months I produced the map you see above, working closely with her to make sure all the details were right. Serendipitously, she was working on a companion novel set in the same world, The Witness for the Dead. This meant that she was able to direct me to insert details into the map which hadn’t been published in book form yet.
One of the fun things about this particular map was that it offered me the chance to explore an alternate style. Usually, I work in strong ink lines and pay attention to every pixel. This map, by contrast, has softer, looser lines and achieves much of its look through gentle shading. It offers a different feel for the terrain features like mountains, forests, deserts, and swamps. All of the art was drawn in Procreate on the iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. The text and other graphical elements were built in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. With the border, I wanted to evoke a bit of the steampunk feel that bubbles under the surface of the novel—but I had to make sure the teeth of the gears meshed together and each gear was affixed to a hub! There’s nothing sillier than steampunk gears that are just slapped onto surfaces as inoperable ornamentation. Drawing the airships was fun—as readers of the book will know, they’re important to the story.
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