Brandon Sanderson
The Heralds, like I said, we want these Sistine Chapel type paintings of the ten Heralds in-world to make as our endpages. And you got four of them in Oathbringer. But there's ten Heralds. So we've been working, slowly over time, collecting pictures from people we really want to work with, who we think would do really good jobs. And we started on these pretty early, because we wanted to find when people had openings in their schedule, of just artists we wanted to work with.
And it was earlier last year, almost a year now, that we got Taln in. And it is gorgeous. And we've got the actual, physical painting. With these, we're buying them all, the physical painting. If they'll sell them; Dan Dos Santos won't sell us his yet. He likes them too much, which we will not push him on that. But we have Jezrien and we have Vev upstairs.
So, yeah, we've got the Taln painting that Isaac is going to grab from you. And he'll do the reveal of who did that, and things like that. But it is one of the best fantasy/science fiction artists of all time.
This will be for Rhythm of War. (If indeed that is the title. Because we haven't officially announced it, yet.)
Isaac Stewart
This is Taln. This will be one of our endpapers at some point for one of the books. Probably this one, but it might not be. I've hired out for the rest of them, so it just depends on what fits the tone of the book.
This is by Donato [Giancola]. And Donato has been amazing to work with. You've probably seen his stuff for The Lord of the Rings. He's done stuff for George Martin. He's done space stuff.
Brandon Sanderson
I have always wanted to own a Donato. He actually did an art piece for us very early in my career for a short story, but it was digital-only, so I couldn't buy it.
Brandon Sanderson
The process on this was, we have these briefs that I write up about each of the heralds. I go into our wiki, I pull out the lore, things that haven't been revealed. I put it all together, and I send out what I'm allowed to to the artist. Which is usually most of it. And then I say the whole thing about, "These are kind of like the Sistine Chapel paintings, and all of the apostles. These are something from the Renaissance of this world, where they have done Vorin representations of the ten Heralds."
So, on this one, I sent him Taln. We know that Taln (especially we know this from Oathbringer) is the one who held the Darkness back, he held the Desolations at bay for thousands of years, something like that. So what we have here, Donato interpreted that as Taln stepping forth out of Damnation with this representation of Damnation in the background.
What else can I say about this? He used our symbols for the Stonewards. We've got some of those in this. We've got our numbers; the Stonewards are number nine, so we've got the Vorin numeral nine in there. The sword, he took that from descriptions of the sword where it's kind of this large, molten nail. Anyway, we're just happy with how this turned out. He only did one revision on it for us, because we didn't need more.