A week ago, I had an idea: What if I did a set of covers for Zelazny’s Amber books? One week later, I have this.

Here’s some closeups. There’s some progress shots after them. And sketches for the rest of the covers.

It’s taken me about 21 hours spread out over the past week. Plus time spent reading the books and taking notes.

Lots of layers. Lots of graphic styles.

Lots of paths. Illustrator keeps crashing when I go to Document Info to find out how many there are and it takes a few minutes to render all the effects when I reopen it. Updating to the latest version doesn’t let me find out either. One of the folks in the Astute Graphics Slack was able to load the file and tells me it’s about 12k paths.

It’s come a pretty long way from a quick doodle on the title page of my copy of the omnibus.

I started reading it with the intent of looking for cover ideas and this one leapt out from the book at me – you’re sixteen pages in, and Corwin has just found a pack of the family’s magical Tarot cards that let them talk to each other no matter how many alternate worlds are between them, and he lays them out on a table and thinks a few sentences about each of them. As I sketched that out I had the additional idea of having everyone reaching out of their cards towards Corwin and that felt so incredibly obvious that someone has to have done that before, but I can only find a few editions that even have cards on the cover at all, and only one lonely audiobook that actually draws more than one of them!

Actually it was grandpa who fucked a unicorn, I couldn’t get a good Latin “translation” out of Google so I left that off the crest when I put it on the tablecloth.

I kept on reading. Got as far as the third book before I stopped. The image for Book 2 initially appeared in my head with the same unnerving alacrity as the idea for book 1, but nobody seems to have done it either. Book 3’s a bit messy but it’s very much a Middle Book and that’s not surprising, I guess. This got me far enough to be able to say “Brand should have a hint of the Courts of Chaos behind him as foreshadowing” though. (Spoilers for a fifty-year-old book, I guess? It’s not like Corwin doesn’t straight up say he doesn’t trust Brand in the two pages of looking at all the cards.)

The crown was one of the last things I finished. As far as I can tell Roger never actually described it in the books beyond saying it’s seven-pointed. I started with a seven-pointed ring of amber and that was good enough but I knew I’d need to come back to it before the picture was finished; I ended up with seven unicorn horns carved out of amber, and a guest appearance of Marigold Heavenly Nostrils from my friend Dana’s comic as the Royal Unicorn Of Amber.

If I do an animated or comics adaptation of this series, I would like the crown to constantly be saying things like “now kids, be nice to each other” in any scene she shows up in. Little orange word balloons with white text. Nobody ever pays any attention to her, at least not in terms of actually talking to her, but there’s definitely room for some humor around the edges here.

Corwin was the first to get drawn, after I’d set up the card borders and the tablecloth.

And then one more bit of inspiration struck: the shadow of Oberon, the absent king of Amber, hangs over the whole saga. Why not make this literal? I put Corwin’s card in front of his shadow and that looked super good. I sketched seven points on his crown’s shadow, and realized: the cartoon sweat drops I’d drawn around Corwin should number seven, too. That’s why there’s pearls accenting the crown, too. To echo those sweat drops.

I started drawing everyone else. Just quick little things, taking note of what little detail Roger gave, and trying to enjoy filling in the other ones.

I mean it is like 90% likely that Roger imagined every single Amberite as a person of Northern European ancestry, all the book covers certainly went down that road, but he doesn’t explicitly specify that Corwin and his sister Deirdre weren’t Black and I think that this is a perfectly fine choice illustrative choice to make. I let Julian manifest with a sort of Japanese samurai vibe, too. Went back in and changed his face to push it a little more later on.

Random’s mustache is incredibly regrettable. I am proud of this. I ended up making deliberately regrettable hairstyle choices for most of the princes I drew after this one.

why how curious, look at that strange background, that is surely some kind of metaphorical Tarot reference and not a foreshadowing of the influence of any opposing organization who lives under strange skies that are both daylight and night-time at once, not at all

Roger is very explicit in the text: “sleepy hollow, man, you ever seen that cartoon? yeah, benedict is one ichabod crane looking motherfucker and he’s a good egg.” Well. Not quite that explicit. But close. My first version had more regrettable hair – he had the same Caesar curls that Mark Zuckerberg affected until recently. Then I read the description and didn’t feel like it would fit.

I generally wanted the feeling that almost every single one of these guys has made hilariously awful hairstyle decisions. I was laughing my ass off at Gérard’s little fringe beard. Nobody around him is willing to tell him that it really isn’t working. Nobody around any of these guys is willing to tell them it isn’t really working. Because they all have a lot of money and the ability to walk to worlds where a major religion is focused on worshipping them as a deity and willing to follow them to death, never mind the ability to find places where everyone is gonna indulge their petty urges like casino employees making sure that high roller gets whatever they wants.

Anyway. This one’s probably done. Writing this up, I saw a few things I might want to go back in and tweak – Julian could be more Japanese, Benedict could be more Ichabod, Random’s shirt could really use a regrettable pattern of parrots or something for that Jimmy Buffett vibe – but this feels like a good place to stop, and either get back to my other projects or turn one of those other two sketches into a cover.

If you want to see the source file, it’s over on Patreon.

edit. I’ve got sketches for all the rest of the Corwin chronicles now.

This one’s actually in progress, I spent a few hours fooling with it and it’s really coming together nicely. The idea came flashing to me pretty early in reading this one and got refined due to the fact that Corwin doesn’t actually fix the Pattern until much later in the series. The central idea of a shadow across the Pattern that blossoms into the monsters of the Black Road felt like something I have to have seen before and yet I can’t find any examples of it.

This is the first one that doesn’t really have a clear image. It’s a messy middle book and hard to pin down into a single image. Doodling this gave me the inspiration to have the Courts of Chaos lurking on Brand’s card though so it was certainly worth my while even if the final piece bears no resemblance to this sketch.

The title is the Hand of Oberon but here I am with the hands of Corwin and Dworkin instead. I feel like there is something to be done to hint more clearly at the “hi I’m your grandpa and I fucked the Unicorn to make your dad” revelation, we will see.

I definitely like this idea though. There’s two layers. Maybe three. A mosaic of views of the castle of Amber in a grid of cards, being blown away by the wind to reveal Chaos beneath it. It needs some kind of human element that’s clearly neither layer and I’m not sure what. I think my idea of a silhouette of Corwin tracing his new Pattern, with the tree branch he planted at its start, and some of the Pattern, all inside his silhouette, is a decent one. Lots to fit into one image though. We will see what happens.