Argent

This one is coming to you all the way from September of last year, so apologies for the long wait but we like to give the artists we work with as much time as they need with these commissions - we are under no deadline, and we don't want to impose one either. In this case - and in all other cases - the wait has been worth it, as this illustration turned out beyond great! Those of you who have read The Alloy of Law will recognize the iconic "tea's poisoned" scene from about halfway through the book. What you might not recognize is the artist, Rixt Heerschop, even though you may have seen their art in this illustrations depicting the climaxes of Oathbringer and Rhythm of War respectively. They have a good eye for color and composition, and happened to be available when we needed someone for this - so, good fortune all around!

*rolls sleeves up* *cracks neck* Spoilers for The Lost Metal Alriiight. It's time to get the spoiler ball rolling. It's been almost a couple of months since the release of The Lost Metal - in fact, Tress of the Emerald Sea is now also out and we'll do a commission dedicated to it in February - which means it's time to reveal some things we've been working on. Starting with our first TLM piece, coming straight from the presses (and the ending of the book)! This is, of course, Wayne saving the day with his duralumin-enhanced speed bubble, with an extra close-up of him and Harmony, just for a bit of extra detail. If you were keeping an eye on 2022's #CosmereInktober challenge, you might recognize the iconic art style of one Diego Lopez, whose Instagram page features a few more Lost Metal illustrations, plus a heap of other Cosmere art. Working with him was a pleasure, so don't be surprised if we go to him for a future piece again In the meantime, our January poll closes tonight, so if you are a patron and want to go cast your vote for the next TLM illustration we commission, time is running out!

There was an annual gift exchange tradition in the fandom that went on for several years, and it strangely coincided with our own holiday season. It was known as Secret Sazed, and while this art commission is not involved with this tradition in any way, it is a Sazed piece, and we are revealing it right around the holidays. So it was a secret Sazed, in the sense that... you didn't know it was coming? Look, overabundance of (Christmas) food is the enemy of wit, this as good of an intro you are going to get. Let's talk about the illustration itself. Those of you who remember the November art poll, or are familiar enough with the various prominent artists in the fandom, might identify the artist as Petar Penev. Sazed is one of his favorite characters, and he was excited to try different ways of representing the two Shards involved in his Ascension to Harmony. The version you see here is the one we eventually settled on (though feel free to keep an eye on his socials, he often posts early drafts of his illustrations, and there were some neat ideas we explored) - focused on Sazed, while representing the powers in a more abstract way. We hope the holiday season is treating all of you well, but if not - we've got more commissions moving through the pipeline (though not at this very moment, as we are encouraging our artists to also take a break), and we should be able to show them to you before too long. Happy (belated) Harmontide!

The madlads, they did it again! They said they were done with the art, yet it keeps coming! Well, this one is the last one for a little bit, for realsies. So what do we have here? In keeping up with our annual tradition (a tradition we established last year, so it's not a very big data set, but still), we are dedicating October to its signature holiday, Halloween - and exploring some of the horror themes present in the Cosmere. You might remember Jordi Rapture from the Cusicesh piece he did for us earlier this year, but if you've seen his portfolio you'll know that horror (and body horror in particular) is where he excels. So we knew that come October we would be checking back with him to see what his availability would be like - and fortunately, it was good! He even read the short story as prep for this piece, and caught some details we would've missed otherwise (like the glowing moss they use instead of fire). A few quick rounds of sketching, and this piece was done way earlier than we thought it would be. Which meant that we get to show it to you on Halloween, which is very appropriate. It's a big image, so you may want to zoom in and go hunting for details.

Alright, hopefully you've had enough time to relax after all these commissions of Kelsier's crew, because today we have a big one for you! This last August was the first time we got to spend our newly-expanded art budget on a single piece - you might recall that we had access to this level of funding back in April, when we commissioned a couple of pieces from Nozomi Matsuoka, but that was a couple of pieces and from an artist we had already worked with; and July was obviously a series of relatively simple illustrations. So we were all excited to see what kind of doors our larger budget could open for us. The first such door was Hugh Hammons whose name - and work - you might recognize from the #arting channel of our Discord. We've long loved his environment concepts, so when we knew we could pay him something close to what his work is worth, we immediately contacted him and worked out a list of subjects he liked. Our patrons chose Urithiru as it appears in Shadesmar, we all got to work, and the rest is history. The commission turned out way better than anyone had imagined it, and Hugh was gracious enough to scrap a few early designs that weren't quite working out - feel free to ask him for them. This final version achieves a perfect balance between the sheer sense of scale, with how big the Tower and the Oathgate pillars are, and the beautiful spectacle that is Urithiru in Shadesmar (or is it the Sibling? Who knows). 10/10 would admire the view.

And finally, last but not least, we top thing things off with honorary crewmember Fuzz himself! This last commission is extra dear to our hearts because it comes from our very own FelCandy! She has long been involved with our art scene in ways both small (custom emoji, art ideas & direction) and big (almost singlehandedly making the Cosmere Inktober a thing; that's still going on, by the way, check out the #CosmereInktober2022 hashtag on your favorite social media website), so we've been wanting to give her one of these official commissions for a while now, and this was finally a good fit! And with this we conclude our series of commissions of Kelsier's crew. Our apologies to all the Yeden fans out there, we just couldn't get to him. As for Demoux... we'll have to find a way to do something for him.

We are stretching the definition of a crewmember here a little bit, but OreSeur - disguised as Lord Renoux - played an important role in Kelsier's plan to bring an end to the Final Empire, and even if Kelsier himself doesn't consider him crew, we do (at least for the purposes of this series of commissions). Barthollamew's signature colorful art style has long been something we love (plus, who doesn't love memes?). Now, the Final Empire is not the best place to showcase this style, but if anyone was going to wear some color, it was going to be the kandra pretending to be a fancy nobleman.

Ha ha! You didn't think we were done, did you? With all of the clever and subtle foreshadowing about "core crewmembers" in the previous posts, you should've known that we'd dip into some less central members of Kelsier's gang, and what better way to start this second batch than Mare herself? Viridia, often known as viridializard (Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr), is better known in this fandom for her Stormlight art (just look at this Evi), but she liked the idea of tackling Mare enough, and who are we to stand between the artist and her art?

And finally, to round off Kelsier's crew, we give you one spooky boi - it is spooky month, after all, we would be remiss not to include Spook himself! We say this a lot 'round these parts, and especially so with these crewmember commissions, but this piece's artist - Theodore Oliver, a.k.a. lazifyre - is yet another artist we've been wanting to work with for a long time. They have a lot of good art we could show off here (like this Siri & Susebron), but none are more iconic than this Inktober piece of Harmony looking after the cast of both Mistborn Eras, except they are all children, and he is a single father of some truly chaotic kids.