Homepage illustration for the official website of fantasy author Aparna Verma, created for the launch of her debut novel, The Boy with Fire, later reissued by Orbit Books as The Phoenix King.
Aparna's brief was to introduce visitors to Ravence, the kingdom of the novel, before they'd read a page of the book.
She wove in Rajasthan's Rajput history and Hindu mythology to shape the kingdom's architecture, a city that has grown modern and dense around its old heart without ever erasing it.
The illustration takes that architecture and atmosphere and gives it a single scene to live in. It pictures Ravence as a city where old and new sit side by side, domed towers and minarets rising among sharper modern silhouettes, all built in warm gold against a deep night sky.
Two moons hang overhead, a detail drawn straight from the kingdom's own founding myth. Above it all, a palace crowns the mountain like a hill fort, its domes echoing Rajput and Mughal architecture, down to the latticework, cusped windows, and lotus finials.
The palette holds two moods. Warm gold, drawn from sun, sand, and the glow of the city, settles into the deep blue mystery of dusk. It's the same mystery that runs through the novel's own turns of secrecy and surprise.
The illustration acts as a second cover for the book, doing on the homepage what a cover does on a shelf, catching a reader's eye and leading them further into Ravence.
