The Domovoi, a Twine game by Kevin Snow, has been released. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be posting my art and sketches from the game. If you haven't checked it out yet, please go take a look -- it's free and short!
The samovar was the first illustration that I completed for The Domovoi. Since the subject was fairly straightforward, it was an ideal place to start -- a good chance to build my skills and confidence and establish the style I would follow in the rest of the illustrations.
There's no shortage of photos for 19th-century samovars online, so I started pulling as many references as I could. Above is the one that I ended up referencing the most while painting; I particularly liked the shape and the ornate handles, which seemed to fit well with the story's text.
Kevin had originally pictured each of the illustrations as close-ups of objects or small, constrained scenes, similar to the chapter illustrations in the Harry Potter series. So for the samovar I basically drew a still life, but I still tried to give it a moody atmosphere through the lighting and color palette.
The final samovar. It's a little simplified compared to my reference (and personally I think I could have made it brighter and more reflective), but I'm happy with how some of the details turned out. My favorite part are the handles; like the domovoi, I find such excess to be beautiful.
Although I briefly considered using a more stylized, Ivan Bilibin-esque look for the finals, I didn't quite have enough confidence that I could pull it off. So I ended up going with realism, which fits in closer to my usual style. There were also plenty of realistic Russian painters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (many of whom chose subjects from the peasant classes), so I had a wealth of source material to try to emulate. That said, I still looked at Bilibin too, and a bit creeped in from time to time.
The samovar transformed into wood. I diverged from my concept art and ended up drew it in a more organic style -- knots, whorls, and brambles that looked like they had somehow grown into the shape of a samovar. Kevin really liked how it turned out, noting that it made the story even weirder... always a good thing!
I really prefer this version to the original; it was just a ton of fun to paint. Little did I realize that it would kick off a long series of detailed illustrations of wood grain, which would end up being one of the main visual motifs of the project.
Next... the iconic towel!
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