Questioner
How do you decide what scenes get depicted in the books?
Isaac Stewart
With the Alcatraz books, I read it, I would fill out a list. The editor read it and filled out a list of different scenes that we would want. And then the artist would do that, as well. And then we would discuss and kind of narrow it down from there.
On these leatherbound books, I will usually approach an artist, and I may have a scene in mind. If the artist is already a fan, I will ask them, "Are there any scenes that you particularly like?" And we'll go from there. But I can't do that with every artist, because they all want to paint Dalinar freeing the slaves, things like that.
Beyond that, I start looking at moments that haven't been depicted before, but ought to be depicted. One of the examples in this one was Navani's painting of the thath glyph. We hadn't seen that done before. (And of course, about the same time, Brotherwise was doing their own version of it, as well. So ours and theirs came out at the same time, and they're both fantastic. Another one of those that's like that is, we had Micah Epstein paint the Heralds leaving their swords behind. And then Brotherwise also did a fantastic rendition of that, using our canonical Blade designs, which turned out really nice, as well. And it was so cool to see the same scene, painted in different ways by different artists.) But that's one of the things I do. And of course, there are these candy bar moments that you want to show somehow in the book.
One of the challenges with these books is that we already had, like, thirty pieces of art in them, in the form of grayscale pieces. For these books, they're two-color pieces. The same artwork that is in the other one; there is one replacement. You'll know which one it is. We'll talk about that one. We do have a few new ones. Ben McSweeney did a Sadeas's bridges piece. I think this is one that we probably should have had in the original book, anyway. We also, in the trade paperback of the Way of Kings, Ben did a piece of the cryptics. And we have taken that and added that into this one as a canonical piece by Shallan. And then we have a replacement for one of the old pieces.
That's sort of the process. I also go to Brandon and say, "Hey, are there any scenes you want to see? If there's something that he feels really strongly about, then we find somebody to do that. So, it's kind of approaching it from all these different angles., and then narrowing it down. Because there's always more pieces than we have time or funds to do. Or even space.