Dungeons and Dragons ABC photobook
For my final in Publication Design, I was given free reign when it came to conceptualizing and designing a photobook, and I was actively encouraged to create a book I’d want. As a massive Dungeons and Dragons nerd, I knew I wanted to make a book that allowed me to share one of my passions while exercising my illustrative limit.
I used an ABC book format to show off a variety of monsters and scenarios one might encounter in a D&D campaign. I approached the content with a lighthearted tone and played heavily into the humor of the situations rather than the horror. While this book is aimed at TTRPG fans, I have been told by non-players that the book was still easy to follow along and enjoy.
The four main characters of this adventure are not characters I have played as or along with in any real D&D campaign; each one is more or less an amplified stereotype of the various archetypes I have seen players use. To save time and energy, I settled on depicting the characters with flat colors as a way to keep them identifiable to the reader and distinguishible from the background elements.
The illustrations proved to be a big undertaking for the project; the book is entirely illustrated, I had to keep the style consistent across all pages, and I needed it all finished within a four week deadline. My first week was focused on finalizing the character designs and writing out each of the rhymes before I even started.
For the next three weeks, my focus was placed on illustrating, with each taking between an hour to two hours to finish. It was the biggest courseload I had taken for that semester, and ate into my personal time, however it never felt like a burden. The more I drew these characters, the more I loved planning out how each one would react in these scenarios.