Escape from Spiral Castle

One of my goals I set for myself at the beginning of the summer was to do an illustration for every book I read. Here is the first one (What?? Two months and you've only read one book?! Pathetique, je sais) for one of my favourites that I read as a kid and then reread this summer after being reminded of it by a classmate's project.

The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander is a great young-adult fantasy novel in the vein of Lord of the Rings (there are a ridiculous amount of parallels between the two, but really, that could be said for pretty much any fantasy book so I let it go) but with more humour (and also more endearing characters, in my opinion).

The scene I chose to depict is a map of sorts illustrating the vast network of tunnels and cells below Spiral Castle, lair of the evil Achren, where several of the main characters are imprisoned during the book.

There was a point during this illustration where I stepped back, looked at it and thought, "Oh sh••, I've pretty much just duplicated Starry Night without realizing it."

I switched it to black and white just to see how it might look if printed in a book. Not sure how I feel about it yet but it's growing on me.