Meet the Artists of Hoid's Storybook Collection

More Than Story Time

Picture books and story books are special. From bedtime stories to classroom readalouds, or beloved and well-worn places on family bookshelves, they can begin as books and end as only memories. The art that brings these stories to life then goes on to spark wonder in artists and writers and inspiration becomes cyclical.

We asked the six artists for Hoid’s Storybook Collection about the art they created for this campaign and the art that helped them become artists. Their answers were full of heart, and the pieces they shared continue to bring the spark of inspiration to the page, trading card, or social feed.

Each of these talented artists has a stunning portfolio of beautiful art, and while I can fit only so much here, I’ve linked to places where you can go to see more. Each of them brings something unique to the project they worked on, and you may recognize some of their work from Tress of the Emerald Sea, The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England, Tor’s edition of Yumi and the Nightmare Painter, or the Dragonsteel Character Pins.

Meet the Artists

Alexis and Justin Hernandez

The Girl Who Looked Up is Dragonsteel's first collaboration with Alexis and Justin Hernandez. Their emotional style communicates with shape and color to tell stories with vibrancy. For more from this powerhouse duo, you can check out their website or their social media.

Anna Earley 

Anna is one of our in-house artists at Dragonsteel. You may recognize her work from the adorable pins on the Dragonsteel Store. Her style and talents go deeper than chibi perfection—Anna directed the art for the Storybook Collection and is the illustrator for The ChasmFriends Get a Pet! More from Anna Earley can be found online or on her socials.

Howard Lyon

Howard Lyon's fine art may be familiar to you if you enjoyed Tress of the Emerald Sea. His paintings capture human emotion intimately and masterfully. His art can be found on his website and social media.

Steve Argyle

Steve Argyle's art is dynamic, using dramatic lighting and composition to create scenes with style. His work on Wandersail evokes the mystery of Wit's early interactions with Kaladin and the cast of the Stormlight Archive. More of his art can be found here on his site and on social media.

Tran Nguyen

Tran Nguyen created the cover image for Tor's edition of Yumi and the Nightmare Painter. She is working with us again on The Fires of December, and her illustrations have a texture and quality that evokes the feeling of sketching at the kitchen table on a rainy afternoon. You can find more from Tran at her website and on her Instagram page.

Ask the Artists—Q&A Responses

Is there a picture book that you remember poring over when you were little? Or is there one you love reading to your kids, if you have any?

Alexis and Justin: Animalia, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, Runaway Bunny read by Mom, Beattrix Potter's books from Abuelita. Dinotopia captivated us with it's worldbuilding. We were obsessed with One Monster After Another by Mercer Mayer. Faeries by Froud & Lee, all the art in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (not exactly picture books, but so much art that we loved). Also just so many comics. We were drawn to anything that had illustrations and worlds to show us.

Anna: Kid me spent a lot of time pouring over picture books. Two of my favorites were Verdi, by Janell Cannon and Fritz and the Beautiful Horses by Jan Brett. They’re just really lovely books that I learned a lot from as a young artist. Also, does the 3.0 D&D Monster Manual count as a picture book? I used to steal it from my older siblings and stare at all the pictures while they would play, because the art was just so amazing to me, haha!

Howard: The picture book that was the highlight of my childhood, and is still a great source of joy, is Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. It released things in my imagination that still excite me. The story was exciting, captivating, and felt a little dangerous at the same time. I remember feeling a buzz of energy in my stomach reading it, and I still feel that way. With my kids, we definitely read Where the Wild Things Are, but I loved reading The Ghashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey, with them. The story is so macabre, and it generated the same excited, nervous energy that Where the Wild Things Are did. It still makes me laugh at the joy and nervous energy that filled the room reading it to my three kids.

Steve: Bernie Wrightson's Frankenstein. Don't panic, I wasn't actually all that little at the time. It is just so masterfully crafted, from the composition down to fine linework. Every page is a scene full of narrative and emotion.

Tran: My favorite picture book when I was little was Love You Forever by Robert Munsch.  This book unlocked the complex, emotional part of my kid brain, and made me realize my parents weren't as invincible as I thought they were. This was a profound read for a first grader and a definite core memory.

Is there an illustration from this campaign that you really enjoyed working on?

Alexis and Justin: Oh, this is a tricky one and a little hard to choose. Probably when the Girl arrives at the wall and we get to see her amongst the cyclopic architecture and statues. But there's also a sequence after her arrival and climbing of the wall that we really enjoyed making and are proud of too. And any chance we got to draw the interesting/odd lifeforms on Roshar—axehound shrimp puppies, cremlings, and chulls (we love drawing strange/cute little guys).

Anna: ChasmFriends as a whole is a really fun book to illustrate. The whole concept is just so goofy, but I also wanted to treat the art seriously, as if it were an actual serialized kid’s property. I’ve done a lot of work in children’s media, so it was really fun bringing that energy into this project. I won’t spoil the image, but I think the “Shoutie the sad pet shoutie really started shouting then” page is the one that gets the most laughs.

Howard: What a pleasure it has been to illustrate The Dog and the Dragon! I think the shot of the dog when it first sees the dragon is my favorite, and that was the first illustration that I created for the book. But I also loved the pages with the bully dogs, and I especially loved painting the bulldog laughing. I think I got lucky and nailed the laugh and expression, and it makes me happy to see the ornery little bulldog getting so much joy over Dug's struggles. Especially knowing that in the end, our hero doggo ends up winning. :)

Steve: It's hard to nail down one in particular. What I loved about the book were the challenges that were unusual for me, and having the chance to design the look of the culture of the Uvarans. Nafti's introduction, and her touring the city were where I really started to get to know them.

Tran: I loved working on the painting for chapter one. Since this chapter has a lot that happens within the span of December's life, I thought it would be fun to approach it with a conceptual depiction rather than pulling from a single moment. I really enjoyed playing with scale and creating a montage composition to convey the emotions of the first chapter. You get to see December as a young woman alongside her older self, mourning the village that has molded her into the person she becomes.

Who are some of the artists, classical or contemporary, who inspire you?

Alexis and Justin: Just remember, you asked! We'll try to stick to formative stuff because we could go on for hours about our inspiration, haha!

Kay Nielson, John Bauer, Golden Age, and a lot of the surrealist and symbolist movements, Remedios Varo and Odilon Redon in particular. Jean Giraud (Moebius) and Team Andromeda's work on the Panzer Dragoon series. Ecco the Dolphin, Final Fantasy, Shining Force. Jim Henson Studios, especially the work they've done with Brian Froud. We've had a love of cyclopic architecture for a long time. Stan Winston is another big one. Magic the Gathering was such an incredible and easy way to take in fantasy illustration. Anime and manga in general are another big influence on our body of work. Michael Whelan, Tony Diterlizzi, Rebecca Guay, Richard Kane Ferguson. We're constantly inspired by all our friends and colleagues; they're all so incredible!

The fractals and patterns that occur in nature also heavily influence our work. Well, really just nature in general. And music! We really could talk on this for hour.

Anna: There are so many! Like many artists, I was very inspired by Alphonse Mucha and J.C. Leyendecker’s gorgeous illustration work.  Though I have also always been very inspired by artists working in animation and gaming. I’ve spent a lot of time studying the work of Nico Marlet (especially his work on Kung Fu Panda), Tatsuya Yoshikawa (his work on the Breath of Fire games was so influential for me), and the work of animators like Yutaka Nakamura and James Baxter. I’m always inspired by their work to keep pushing my own art to be more lively and energetic.

Howard: The list is so long! But my big heroes are William Adolphe Bouguereau, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, John William Waterhouse, and John Singer Sargent. For contemporary artists, and for this book especially, Scott Gustafson is a real hero of mine. I love the pure joy and happiness that he always captures in his illustrations.

Steve: Oh, we could be here all day with that question. But in particular for Wandersail, I was inspired by Alphonse Mucha. In particular his Slav Epic. I got to see it in person while I was sketching out ideas, and I was moved by the feeling he was able to invoke in each work. So I tried to bring some of that to the Wandersail. Though as the project went on, I was constantly cursing my past self—it's harder than it looks.

Tran: There are so many!  To keep it short, I cherish the works of Amano Yoshitaka.  His paintings are made of top-tier elegance.  Back then, on every weekend visit to the grocery store, I would flip through issues of GamePro magazine to look for his newest video game illustrations.  Also, I'm really proud to share that I have a humongous, limited-edition FF10 print hanging in my foyer and I stare at it all the time!

What made you want to pursue art as a career?

Alexis: I have a particularly vivid memory of watching Stan Winston in a behind the scenes thing for Jurassic Park. Seeing them talk about the process really flicked a light on in my little kid head. Also after beating Ecco the Dolphin on the Genesis, of course objectively I knew people made the game but seeing the names in the credits really made my kid brain connect with the fact that folks came together to make this experience you could get lost in, and I was fascinated by that. Same with anything Jim Henson—we were just so enamored with the world building.

Justin: Oh, absolutely agree with Alexis. There was a specific episode of the The Jim Henson Hour where they went into how they make the puppets and one following a boy and an animatronic dragon that have just lived in my head forever. Also seeing Diterlizzi's work for the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2 Monster Manual, I think that was one of the first times I really connected that this was someone who had gotten to make all these neat things in this way, that illustration could be something you can really do!

Anna: When I was in first grade, we got a class assignment to read Where the Wild Things Are and then draw our favorite Wild Thing. I drew the black-and-yellow-striped one, and as I was drawing the kid sitting next to me went, “Wow! Yours is so good!!” And I think that was the first time I stopped to actually consider the quality of my own art, and went “…Maybe I am good at this?” And seven-year-old me felt very proud of herself and decided that she should spend even more time drawing than she already did, and now here we are. Ha!

Howard: I have always loved to draw, but it wasn't until I started playing Dungeons and Dragons at age 10 that I remember consciously wanting to pursue art. It triggered my imagination dramatically, and seeing the illustrations in the books opened my eyes to the reality that someone was getting paid to create fantasy art!

Steve: Michael Keaton. More specifically, Batman. I was a kid when the movie came out, and I was awestruck. After annoying my parents with asking to go see it over and over, they bought me the comic book adaptation. That started an unhealthy obsession with comic books. I had thought that everything was done by one person. One person invented the characters, wrote the story, and did the art. So I wanted to be that person. I was confident in my writing—the omnipotent confidence only an eleven-year-old possesses. But with art, it was a little bit harder to delude myself. The more I practiced, the more I enjoyed it. And I just stuck with it.

Tran: I was immensely inspired by all the amazing anime and JRPGs created in the '90s.  It was such a wonderful escape from boredom and adversity.  I would rent anime from the local VHS stores, pause it on the frame I wanted to replicate, and scribble as fast as I could on paper what I saw on the TV screen.  That was sort of how I taught myself how to draw.  As I learned more and drew better, I became adamant that this was what I would spend the rest of my life doing.

Do you have a favorite work of art from Magic the Gathering or Pokémon?

Alexis and Justin: Our first card for Magic, Brainstorm in Strixhaven, will always hold a special spot for us for sure. More recently very much Starwinder, a big colorful space whale/leviathan—it's exactly the sort of thing we love to draw/paint and exactly the sort of thing that we'd get all kinds of weird unfriendly guff about from college (down to the colors we liked to use!). So it's been particularly satisfying to succeed on something within the bounds of exactly what they told us would not be successful and that we needed to cut out. Our most favorite, and special to us piece isn't out yet though. It comes out with Reality Fracture and you will definitely be able to tell which one it is :)

For art that we like from Magic, I think we tend to have a rather common problem, there's just so much great art!

Ones that come to mind immediately though are Kitnap by Irina Nordsol. There's just something so perfectly captivating, dreamy, sinister, and beautiful to this piece; it's one we really wish we could get a playmat of (need to grab a print of it or something). Another recent-ish favorite is Dawn's Truce by Mariah Tekulve. It's such a well-executed piece with a lovely balance of organic shapes, textures, and design creating such a lovely moment of tension (also doesn't hurt that for us, it invokes The Secret of Nimh in the best ways).

Boy, would we love to do something for Pokémon someday, with that said we it's another TCG [trading card game] that we love seeing all the art coming out for. I think in particular what tends to catch our eyes the most are the gorgeous dimensional/sculpted art on some of the cards. There's just something so perfectly human to it, I don't know exactly how to describe it.

Anna: I am, admittedly, a total newbie when it comes to Magic, but I used to steal my older brother’s Magic cards to look at the art as a kid (just like the D&D books, haha!). A few years back though, I received a starter deck that contained Rudy Siswanto’s Prized Unicorn card, and I have hung onto it as I really love the art. I did collect Pokémon cards as a kid though, and my favorite card artist was always Mitsuhiro Arita. I am especially fond of his old-school Nidorino and Cubone cards.

Howard: I think I love just about everything that Chris Rahn, Ryan Pancoast, and Victor Adame Minguez paint. I am friends with many of the Magic artists and I have highlights from so many of those artists. Of my own work, Angel of Flight Alabaster was a critical painting in my career that helped me see that my own fantasy art could reach a little higher. I also loved painting Harmless Offering and any of the angel paintings I was assigned. Magic has such an abundance of great art. It is an honor to have painted as many pieces for the game as I did.

Steve: There have been so many amazing works from Magic that it might drive me mad to try and single out just one. Desolation Angel by Brom is one of the first cards where the art really struck me, so I'll shield my sanity from the rabbit hole and go with that one.

Tran: Tabletop card games were a vital gateway into illustration when I was young.  My favorite work of art from Magic the Gathering is Mirri's Guile by Brom.  It's such a gorgeous painting, especially to a 10-year-old who was new to Western fantasy art.  I also grew up collecting Ani-mayhem cards, just for the art.  Unlike with Magic, my brothers and I didn't know how to play Ani-mayhem, so instead, we would play Tiến lên and bet with the Ani-mayhem cards.

Art is part of us, Kaladin. That’s the use; that’s the reason. It exists because on some fundamental level we need it. Art exists to be made.

Hoid knows his stuff. And the artists who have brought his stories to life know theirs. If you're interested in owning their art for yourself, check out Hoid's Storybook Campaign on BackerKit until March 27th, then keep an eye out for their release on the Dragonsteel Store.

Until then, may you be inspired by the art around you every day.