The Gurkish Army - Joe Abecrombie's Last Argument of Kings

The Gurkish Army, illustration I made for Joe Abercrombie's Last Argument of Kings, illustrated spansh version. The project includes Cover, Jacket and 6 interior illustrations.
This one is on the moment the gurkish army is attacking Adua. It was a quite conceptual piece, because there were no specific scene or moment of it. There were not too much descriptions of the gurkish army, just some about white colors and golden flags. So, I tried to maintain some kind of lightness in the colors, but I also wanted to show different tones according to the big variety of peoples countries and cultures the massive army was composed of.

Talking with the editor, she said something like “I’d like to see the war machines” and I immediately mixed that idea with the army, the different civilization based on the adoration of a strange god that we assume eats people (or at least allows it)... and the movie Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914) with its great Moloch came to my mind, with its design inspire in a bull (the original Moloch legend). So, I decided a great bull head was going to be in the middle of composition. The rest were “the words”. The gurkish army has its “special group” called the 100 words, something that evokes a religious text or commandment. I incorporated these golden words in the weapons, flags and shields, as a symbol o the power of Uthman-ul-Dosht is in his weapons as much as in his faith.