johnnywander

[gif] Making some fake alchemy

Added 2021-09-24 18:06:53 +0000 UTC

I shared this illustration a while ago but now that the page has been shared I wanted to share the making-of!

I've mentioned this before but piecing together pseudo-magical/scientific imagery is a guilty pleasure of mine, the internet is a goldmine of scans of alchemical texts and I love to collect them. I also attached some references I was pulling from when putting this together.

My intent was essentially to visually break magic into schools of "theoretical" and "applied," and just to go ham with imagery that leaned into those two concepts. When I think about 'magic' within the world of Barbarous I think a lot about math and programming (two things I'm famously bad at lol). Just lots of cognitive stuff and piecing things together just-so to work within a pre-existing framework. The idea of a writ wizard's spells is just a single hand-written program, that can only be run once. Like a stack of punch-cards that you have to burn to make it work. Anyway, magic in Barbarous sucks? That's why people like Percy and Alexander Calbraith are so special, and so super rare.