Art Blog: The Art of Homestead
Our Adventure Triptychs (Battleborn, Stealth, and Pensive) have been with us for a long time, but were rereleased in October of 2024 with proper module setups! Prompts, NPCs, and story beats were added to create an adventure you could run more easily with your friends! These were interspersed with public domain art (scouring many museum databases) and a few in-house drawn assets (by yours truly, and Christoff on map pieces) to accompany the settings described with each new story.
It was a way to level-up the product, as well as indulge in what makes us Cantrip. At Cantrip Candles, we love storytelling, art, and gameplay, and it felt like a step in the right direction for a product we were pitching as not only candles sets, but story starters! But we knew we could push further, and had long fallen in love with the idea of a village-creation module taking place over several seasons. To do it justice, we brought in a long-time artist collaborator, Juliana Ouyang, to work on our newest candle & module triptych: Homestead!
Original sketch concepts for main illustrations in Homestead, by Juliana Ouyang, featuring two differing versions of the main “Opening” illustration, Season illustration concepts quite different from the final illustrations, and an illustration for Complications.
Julaina has worked with us on several projects: the sleeve wraps on our Ten Candles sets, the sleeve of our Valheim candle set, as well as some marketing illustrations! Versatile, crunchy and homey, we knew she’d be a perfect fit to convey the expanse of this project!
And it’s a fairly wide expanse, at that.
We wanted an illustration for each NPC that the players of the module would be interacting with on the regular, based on their specific areas of interest for village development. Not only that, but we wanted illustrations for many of the developments and activities that could be explored in your new town to further its progress! And of course, three overarching illustrations for the development of your town in each season.
Further concepts for the seasons, establishing the idea of a singular scene changing over the course of a year.
Illustration for Spring, early in the town’s development. First foundations, and a budding tree.
Illustration for Summer, with development underway. A tree casting shade during the warm months of the year.
Illustration for Autumn, with villagers enjoying the fruits of their labor, and the tree beginning to shed its leaves on the ground.
Homestead, the module, contains 27 specifically commissioned illustrations to accompany your gameplay! We wanted to go all-out here, to make Homestead something uniquely special, and a testament to what we could offer!
And, funnily enough, the first finished illustration for Homestead was of the botanist, Osric O’Malley, who served as the botanist in question for our Botany line of candles! A delightful little tie-in, for those in-the-know!
Osric O’Malley, a druid accompanying your caravan in Homestead. He will spearhead the optional development of the Herbalist’s Laboratory, or the Garden, if you so choose to take an herbalism route for that project!
There are many options you can choose to develop as you grow your town your own way, and we wanted to include little illustrations for as many as possible! Here’s a small sampling of what you may find between the pages of our Homestead module:
Small illustration for the optional development of a Great Hall.
Small illustration for the optional development of magical defense wards.
Small illustration for the optional development of Fishers as a food source.
Dera, who spearheads the optional development of the Fishers.
The Homestead project has gone through a long development process, a span of over a year, and we are so pleased to have a gorgeously illustrated module to accompany our seasonal candles! The candle triptych itself comes with a QR code for a digital download version, but given the expanded care that went into Homestead, we’ve also created our first printed booklet for this module!
Ride on into the Gardenweigh valley on your caravan, and develop a new town, in your own way!
Shop the Homestead collection here!
