Sabetha and Locke Lamora dinner

Sabetha and Locke dinner, illustration I made for the special edition of the fantasy classic The Gentlemen Bastards sequence’s Book three: The Republic of Thieves, written by Scott Lynch and edited by The Broken Binding in collaboration with Gollancz . The project includes 6 endpapers for the 3 books of the sequence.

This illustration is quite special for me. During the previous two books I imagined Sabetha all the times she was indirectly mentioned. It was like a puzzle I finally completed in book 3, so having the chance of representing her was very exciting. The proposed scene was very accurate for illustrate her in my opinion: a dinner between the two ex-lovers, isolated in a small space which I interpreted as a forced silent dialogue with their attitude and veiled intentions. Sabetha has a more self confident aura, looking at the dishes on the table, relaxed, hair loose and more comfortably dressed. Locke, on the other hand, has more formal clothes, more concern for his appearance, tense, uncomfortable and, of course, looking at her.

I tried to preserve the clothes, environment and dishes description as much as I could. The color palette was a bit tricky due to all these elements and the sunset tone, so I tried to relax the atmosphere with more soft/cream colors to create “space” between tones. Also the representation of the space, as a floating cage over the horizon, was a bit confusing at the beginning.