One hundred dwarves

Last year I was hired to create fifty illustrations including the cover for a puzzle book. The format was unusual because it was going to be triangular, like a mountain, because the overarching story between the riddles was a tribe of dwarves trapped by the magical queen (a bearded lady with a golden hat). Sadly, the book wasn't made, but I am still proud of the works I created for it.


My first drawing to get the job of a dwarf. You can see my dwarves aren't actually very small. I enjoyed giving him some biker accents, because I imagine dwarves to be a lot like truckers and construction workers.

The design is still recognisable in the main protagonist Günther, who is younger and cleaner than this guy.

When we discussed the style of illustration for the book, I came up with a few options. Everyone loved the idea of fully coloured acrylic illustrations; since it was to be the publisher's first book, we decided to go with black and white traditional ink in the end, with colour accents to help with the riddle solutions.

My first cover ideas were design only, featuring triangles prominently. The publishers asked for something more figurative, so I drew some more ideas. When the black and white style was settled on, it was decided the cover would also be greyscale.

The dwarves are a tribe of one hundred, the riddles have to do with the queen giving them hats of different colours and asking them to sort themselves. There's always a difficulty added - nobody can see their own hats or only their own hats - and I had to look out for that in the illustrations. The hats were designed so their complexity corresponded to the difficulty of the riddle, and complementary colours chosen for each pair of two.

Besides Günther, there were only two other dwarves that had to be recognisable, and I created a few loose designs to choose from while drawing.

One of my favourite things was the magic queen on her sapphire throne. I went through a few ideas until I found something fitting; she spends the entire time on her throne that is cut from one giant sapphire, so she had to look good sitting.

For each illustration, I created two loose thumbnails for the publisher. I modelled the chosen one in Blender, and overlaid the format mock-up with its large safe area margin using PureRef. I then drew over it in Photoshop and traced it from the monitor, using 30×40cm paper, to be printed at half that size. I drew with ink pens in various widths, then painted loosely with diluted Indian ink, using sponges and salt to create extra texture and white acrylic ink pens for highlights. Coloured spots were used with pure inks.

Icons were to be used to indicate if the next page would be more story, help to solve the riddle, or the solution. We chose miners' lamps with traffic light colours for this.