Battle of the Gods, the final illustration outcome!

The illustration side of my Battle of the Gods project is more centred on the characters and story that I'm trying to tell through my game. With this in mind I decided to make a booklet with artwork, stories and the rules for the game.

This is largely inspired by the source books that I used to pour over when I played Warhammer a lot as well as by the source books from the newer game I play called Infinity. The art style was much more similar to the Warhammer books, but I preferred the way the Infinity books are laid out with the stories at the beginning and then the rules at the back, with comics and character art throughout.

My original plan was to use the vector drawings I'd done as the character art, but when I tried it they looked out of place besides the hand drawn comics, so I redrew them in pen and then they looked much better.

For the comics I tried to get across humorous interactions between characters, shows of strength or in the case of Fire Bat just a little insight into the characters day to day life. It was a refreshing change to draw shorter 3-5 panel comic strips compared to my larger format Grug comic, but I was able to use everything I've learnt from doing Grug to make these comic strips interesting to look at.

The typeface I used was Carlson Antique because it is the one that Warhammer source books use, I tried making my own but due to its decorativeness I could only use it for the headings.

When it came to making the booklet I used what I have learnt from editing Backwards Burd and printing Grug to paginate the book correctly and then print it on a risograph printer on paper I had sourced specially from GF smith. The cover used a full colour painting though so I printed it at Service Point using their laser printer on 160gsm paper. Then I bound it together by hand. I made 3, the last one being the best bound. Because the inside pages were printed on a risograph the registration between the front and back of the pages was a little off, but because I use large inside margins this was not too great a concern.

The final outcome really looks like a wargame source book, so I'm very happy with it. I would have liked to have printed it on an indigo press but the cost was too prohibitive considering how few copies of the book I actually need, but if I were to pursue Battle of the Gods as a commercial enterprise I would print it more reguarly than it was on a risograph.