MM Romance Fantasy Art: The Gates.
From early sketches to full-color digital illustrations of the Gates: a concept for the after-climate-disruption (ACD) world of my MM romance fantasy stories.
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Twenty years ago I drew on paper with oil pastels. The road from there to being able to illustrate my queer fantasy world the way I imagined it — that road was long. What follows is part of it.
The Gates.
More about the concept is in one of the ACD world’s wiki entries. In short, the Gates network was my vision of how humanity progressed through two energies — natural and artificial, from Crystals. It was first used in the Sect, the natural energy sanctuary, to control entry inside their borders. Scientists later discovered it could transport people from place to place, the way some energy Elders could — like Wei or Song from the Taj and Song Trilogy.
After testing, the Gates were adopted planet-wide. Ships, planes, everything from before the Disruption was abandoned. The Gates also served as data transmission devices and eventually connected every planet in the Empire, starting with an enormous logistics Gate to each new world, then a network of smaller ones spreading across it.
This is what I had in mind. Then came the question of how they should look.
The entry Gate to the Sect was round, its energy layers resembling rainbow cotton; not because they had to look that way, but to signal that an energy barrier existed, so people, like birds, wouldn’t fly into it trying to force entry. The enormous Gates came later: bigger, different, still unresolved in my mind for a while.
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These are the first sketches from 2024. The coloring took months to develop; these early ones show where that process started.
The black-and-white Gate illustrates a scene from book two (Bridges, Taj and Song Trilogy), where Taj fights the creatures. The Gate was the crucial background element. The Gate on Planet Three (Bonaire) from book three (Horizons) had to feel vast and significant. That drawing became one of my personal favorites.
After black and white, the coloring work began in earnest. These are the newest Gates: full color, smudged, without the liquify effect used in the earlier b&w pieces. The style: oil-pastel, smudged, hand-illustrated is the one I’m carrying forward into the First Crystaler series.
Read more about MM romance fantasy art on my blog. All queer fantasy illustrations are in the Gallery.