Gooday everyone,
Welcome to the Deacon Corner. If you’re new here, this space dives into the inspirations behind the images you’ll find throughout the books on these pages. What began as a place to share commission breakdowns has grown into something more. In addition to detailing how each piece came to life, you’ll now find expanded chapter notes, lore entries, and my own black-and-white concept illustrations which are raw glimpses into the ideas that shaped this world before they fully took form.
Before we begin, it’s important to say that none of the beautiful stylized images found in the hard and soft copies of these books would exist without the incredible talent of Sickjoe who is quite literally the heart and soul of this visual world. If you appreciate his work as much as I do, I highly encourage you to visit his gallery and explore more of his creations.
Now, without further ado, let’s take a look at the featured image and learn a bit more about the lore hidden in this chapter.
Alrighty for the month of June, let’s have a piece done for Nona. We’ll be using the adult version of her for this piece and all the prior points about her still apply. In this one, let’s also have the Gnatu make an appearance.
The Gnatu: These creatures are a sentient race of machines that resemble hermit crabs, but instead of ‘shells’ they wear toolboxes, outlets, flashlight tubes, etc. Pretty much anything left behind by humanity from any era and place. Like Bastion, they have a camera lens for a face but, unlike him, they are more modern in appearance and don’t have the leathery bellows of the older conduits (Think more like digital cameras instead of old photo-boxes). The Gnatu also come in all shapes and sizes, some as large as the ballast tanks of battleships, while the more common ones are smaller than kitchen mice.
In this scene, Nona is remaking one of her adoptive children into a bird. She has realized that the Gnatu all dream of being organic in some form or another and she wishes to make their dreams a reality. As a talented seamstress, she stitches flesh and feathers as easily as a new garment. Quartz, her newly born son, is sitting on her lap without his shell. She has stitched onto his body chicken wings, feathers of all different colors, and a beak from a bird’s skull. She’s working on grafting his tail feathers and feet and uses a few tools separate from her body, but has to rely mostly on the needle from her nape to give life to what was once dead. She’s also added a care and content label (like on the back of T-shirts) on the underside of his belly.
In this piece, Quartz is about half finished, his camera lens peeking out under his beak, and there are other Gnatu of all different sizes and ‘shells’ waiting their turn around Nona. This scene takes place in a first-class stateroom from the Carpathia and Nona is seated on a couch absorbed in her work.