The Tale That Twines Art Gallery
Aside from painting illustrations for the book covers and oracle deck, I draw my characters a lot for fun! Some of these have been shared before on social media or in a blog post, but this gallery also contains a bunch of sketches and drawings I haven’t shared at all. Most of it is pen and watercolor or watercolor pencil, with some ink and Posca marker thrown in for details.
Spoiler Warning: There are plot points mentioned in some of the image captions (on desktop, they only show if you click the image to full screen and then mouse over it, so you can avoid them) but the images themselves are pretty safe, in my opinion.
Accessibility Note: All images have visual descriptions in the caption! Yay!
Another Important Note: This is how I imagine the characters look, but if you imagine them differently, that’s awesome!! Some of my OWN drawings aren’t even fully accurate to how I see them in my head, lol. Fanart is welcome! And if you ever wanna send me fanart, tag me on Instagram (don’t DM me, I don’t look at DMs) @numinousspirit or shoot me an email through my contact form with a link to wherever it’s posted. I’d love to see it!
First, some old-ish art
I first started fleshing out June and Aeronwy’s backstory while working on the original comic script version of The Thread That Binds in 2018. Some of you may be aware that it was originally going to be a big huge graphic novel series, and may have even read the 70 pages of it that I did draw! In that version, June was dead (GASP) and it was a murder mystery. June and Aeronwy’s backstory from when they were younger was woven in with the events of The Thread That Binds as a parallel plotline. When I switched to writing it as a novel, I changed the plot and ended up having to cut that stuff—but I saved it for later, and that’s where The Tale That Twines and The Flame That Sings (book 3, the Aeronwy-narrated prequel which I’ll be working on next) come in.
Anyway, this was when I fell in love with the two of them. As much as I adore the trio from Book 1, Aeronwy and June are my favorite babies in this series And It Shows. There’s a lot of smooching, because apparently that’s what my brain feels is Important. If you were part of my Patreon in 2018-19, you probably saw these! The gala dance was always A Big Plot Thing, right from the very beginning.
See also in this gallery: some young and old Maireads, although I don’t consider the young ones accurate to the book now.
More recent art
Now for stuff that’s from 2020 onward! I’d consider these more accurate and canonical than the previous years, especially since The Thread That Binds came out in October 2020. There is a lot of young June art since, y’know, in the past three years my focus has been on The Tale That Twines with June as the main character.
