Book of Nemus and Insular Art

Over the last year or so I've been slowly reworking a web-comic I worked on a few years ago called the "Book of Nemus". I co-wrote and pencilled the original version for the 43 pages we managed. 

They can still be viewed here:  

http://www.webcomicsnation.com/shoxstudios/sandsong/series.php?view=single&ID=88866 

This is the first page of the second chapter

of the original Book of Nemus story. You can

See the symbols for water and stone on the

banners in the background.

It was a great experience. I got to work and collaborate with people from around the globe, learned a lot about  storytelling and sequential art that you just can't get from reading instructional books and I was really into the story, the characters and the world creating process. 


Well, various things happened and it ended up in limbo for a while then unfortunately we just had to call it a day for a while. So yeah, I've been re-writing and developing the story on my own over the last year. I'm trying to apply everything I've learned whilst studying animation over the last few years about concept art, character and environment development and visual narrative. 


One of the things I liked originally about the design of Book of Nemus were the symbols created for the logo to represent water and stone. They're great designs by an artist named Rob Richardson, and they really helped add some extra character to the environments in some scenes. 


(http://apps.robsart.net/Blog/ He's got some nice pieces of work up on his blog so go have a look!)


So I've been thinking how I can push that further with the designs of the revised version and been looking for ideas and inspiration for new logos and monograms to act as insignia for the various parties in the story. A couple of things discussed in this mornings lecture grabbed my interest regarding this. 


The first was just general designs based around the "insular art" style and the second was medieval monograms. I always kind of liked Gothic architecture and design and having a closer look at some of the works in the lecture today got me thinking about how I can integrate this into the Book of Nemus.

Here are a few examples of the style I want to try and work into the design of Book of Nemus.

This one is the Chi Rho page from the Book of Kells. It's just stunning. 

There's so much going on with the patterns, shapes and colours.

I like this one because it's so abstract. This is exactly the type of image I would want to design for Book of Nemus. It's and old Medieval Celtic model of a cats head.

The two below are other examples of the complexity of these types of design.

I'm going for a sort of mix of cultures with Book of Nemus really. Some of the way the politics of the world are set up is based on ancient Rome with a Senate of powerful people from various houses making up the ruling body of the empire but a lot of the architecture I want to have looking very harsh and reptilian as the aliens themselves are sort of based on reptiles and amphibians. 


I think the recurring shapes and designs in Gothic art and architecture would be a good match for this as I can probably have them represent reptilian spines or ridges etc....