I absolutely love ornate lettering and highly decorated books. While debut novels don't usually get the love, I really really wish I could include this lettering! So instead, for now at least, I'll share with you guys here!

The decorative lettering is meant to represent key themes in book one, you'll see how sun and moon themes seem to be melding together into this single letter. I've also made moon versions of this as well, maybe I'll share in a future blog! In this case, as the first book, we have sun and moon concepts largely balanced, maybe a little more heavily influenced by sun as we spend most of our time in Altan, the empire of the sun people. Only when we arrive in the city-state of Elissia do we finally meet Leo and people from the moon kingdom of Runa. 

This letter "L" was painstakingly created by hand digitally. It took me a week! 

I blame Dragon Masters and my little 8-year-old son. 

We were reading at bedtime a couple months ago and he saw the cool dragon-styled lettering in Dragon Masters by Tracey Wells. He looked up at me with his sweet 7-year-old face, pointed to her beautiful lettering at the beginning of a chapter and said in his little voice, "Mom, you really need something cool like this in your book." Well, I agreed and so started the agony....

Meaning of the symbols

I wanted this lettering to represent the Moon Power and Sun Power combining - something like what the Major Academy and Elissia city-state represent in the story.

But I didn't just want a picture of a moon and sun, I wanted them intertwined as well as slightly luminescent to represent the respective sunwielding and moonwielding magic in the story. If you zoom in it just looks like etheral magic is coming off the moon. 

Process I used

I am by no means a pro at digital painting. I used my iPad with the Procreate App to draw this lettering. Much of the detail was painstakingly completed at the pixel level. Most portions of this letter were created by hand at the pixel level using an Apple Pen in order to get the strong detailing. I might go blind before I finish all this special lettering! But I love how it turned out :) worth it! 

I have several letters now, although not enough to complete a book - most of the time I tried to leverage this L as a beginning and then altered the letters from there. I'm sure other artists have faster and better abilities and creative processes! But I did love learning a lot about both digital painting and Procreate through this process and love the final product. 

There is something about making your own book lettering, especially for a book you put your whole heart into.

Maybe that is what the ancient tomes like the Book of Kells was all about. A scribe's expression of love for a book!  

Ps. I am NOT sponsored by anyone/any brand. So when I include brand names here it is really just what I happen to be using. I'm not recommending anything, I haven't taken the time to really test things, but this is what I use and enjoy at the moment! :)