Places from the Fallen London Universe

[HannahFBG]

I'm excited to introduce you to Paul and Toby, our art team. Paul has been with Failbetter since the very beginning, and was the sole artist on Fallen London for many years. He also art directed Sunless Sea, and was creative director on Sunless Skies. Toby joined us for Sunless Skies, elevating our art team to the dizzy heights of two! And is responsible for swathes of Sunless Skies' environment and its reading interface, as well as many of the character portraits in Fallen London.

In this thread I'm going to present their inspirations for Fallen London, next to some in-game artwork.

Inspirations

• Fallen London makes strong use of silhouette, and a big inspiration for our silhouette work is Jan Pieńkowski. He's probably best known for his gorgeous pop-up books, but he also does amazing illustrated fairytales.

From Jan Pienkowski's The Kingdom Under The Sea, above, and location art from Fallen London, below

• Paul is a massive fan of Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula, and there's a lot of that hammy richness in Fallen London.

A still from Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula, and the Empress' Court from Fallen London

• Sunless Skies was influenced by art nouveau...

A collection of Alphonse Mucha cards, compared with a sprite atlas from Sunless Skies

• The apocalyptic sublime, especially John Martin...

The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, John Martin, and a piece of Kickstarter concept art for Sunless Skies

• And Caspar David Friedrich - particularly for the Eleutheria region, the creation of which Toby wrote an art blog about.

Northern Sea in the Moonlight vs Eleutheria

 

[SWard]

Woah this is amazing!

 

[PCG Rachel]

This is really cool, love the art nouveau inspiration.