Wylie Beckert's Mock Book Cover For Piranesi By Susanna Clarke

Wylie Beckert's mock book cover for Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Image description: Four digital artworks in a relatively simply colored style, all of humanized Hollow Knight characters. The first is in shades of yellows and greens, and depicts a post-fall of Hallownest Quirrel, clad in segmented armor, tying his headscarf. Lingering in his memories, Monomon wraps her own headscarf around her head, though its drifting in the wind obscures her face.

The first is in shades of mild pinks and greys, and depicts Nailmaster Mato and the Knight. Mato smiles, hands open in a sort of ‘ta-da!’ motion, for he has just finished tying the Knight’s hair up into two little pigtails, reminiscent of their canon horns. The Knight appraises his work with a neutral expression, and beads and other ribbons lay scattered at the two’s feet.

The third is in shades of greys and blues, though with a dash of red. Hornet and the Hollow Knight sit, back to the camera. An exhausted Hollow Knight sits patiently as their sister Hornet braids their hair with four efficient arms, while their helmet and Hornet’s needle lay, unused, behind the two.

The fourth is in shades of glowing whites, with a dark black background. The White Lady, a huge tree-woman, smiles as she hands the Pale King, a many-handed worm, his imitation human face. Said human face is elegant and bears a neutral sleeping expression, with neatly flowing straight hair. End ID.

hair, etc

"maus is triggering just fyi!!" yeah that's the point??? lmfao?? "oh no the holocaust exists and it's triggering my anxiety" shut the fuck up

I know I’m being an insufferable worldbuilding nerd here, but my basic metric for evaluating media with very inhuman protagonists is “how easily can one offer a complete and coherent account of this media’s plot without ever mentioning the fact that the protagonist is, for example, a talking car?”. The harder it is, the higher it scores.

love ur hk designs! how did u come up w/them? do u have any notes?

aww thank you so much anon !! i DO in fact have notes but theyre a lot so [cracks knuckles] lets go thru this --

i love designing and humanizing characters as its a real fun brain exercise and such, but humanizing the hk characters has really given me a lotta gusto that perplexes even me ?? either way im not complaining its very fun and im glad to elaborate on all (bc its a lot) the thought that went into these!!

Image Description: Digital art of humanoid Hollow Knight Characters. Quirrel, Hornet, the Knight, and the Hollow Knight are all hanging around a bench and looking at the camera. The Knight is sitting on the bench, their legs dangling off, and holding their helmet. The Hollow Knight, all bandaged up, is sitting on the ground but leaning their head on the back of the bench. Quirrel is standing and leaning on the bench back, making a thumbs up and smiling a big smile. Hornet is also standing, though she rests three of her hands on the bench with an unimpressed expression. End ID.

in this post i’ll be talking about inspirations and show off the designs of the knight, hornet, quirrel, thk, the dreamers, and some less polished higher beings designs -- and go over it all with my neverending commentary! everything's under the cut in order to spare y'all's dashes LMAO

with regards to groundwork! hopefully my thoughts laid out below will give you some direction but let’s say you’re just beginning with your own designs. what questions do you ask? where do you even begin?

here’s what i do, basically. try to figure out what aspects of the character you want to be most important. do you want their silhouette to be immediately recognizable? are you inspired by a particular time period or region, or want to set it in that time period or region? do you want to prioritize colors? are you willing to let go of silhouette / direct visual relatability in lieu of emphasizing personality in the little details of appearance? try to strike that balance and see what is to your taste.

there are some things you can easily render turning bug to person (as i love diverse face shapes so you’ll see a trend of pointy in game, pointy here) and some that are much harder. either you can go for what is straightforward and easy for someone to be like “oh hornet head shaped mask! that must be hornet!” or you can not do that! your humanizations, your rules. hollow knight has a very simple, curve and shape-based art style, so you can incorporate a lot of subtle details on that! you can also do any other motif and really lay into it -- if you look at my monomon i have all these that are jellyfish-esque: her gown shape, her choker, her braids, the embroidery on her gown, etc.

or you can ignore all my advice and do what you want! i’m not the boss of you.

so , FIRST THINGS FIRST: aesthetic inspirations ! i did a few passes based on a variety of regions but i decided go with a pre-modern era european influence, largely because of the general influences and vibes i saw in the in-game architecture and appearances for things and places. i decided to land my inspirations anywhere from the 1500s to late 1700s / veery early 1800s, though aiming for simply inspiration and not extreme historical accuracy because that would be getting into au territory and just aaaahahah craaazy [kicks some papers under the table]

i decided to have individuals from before the fall of hallownest have look inspirations from Later in this time frame with those after being Earlier to get this kind of ‘technology and society has backslid’ idea. that, and because i thought the aesthetics of later monarchist europe -- l’ancien regime and all that, if you will -- quite fitting with hallownest right before its fall. because of this extremely broad time frame (300 years!) and also me just generally not trying to be concerned with ‘historical accuracy’ as this is both non-historical and very fantastical, there’s going to be a mess of silhouettes and such -- so those more inclined to that bear with me here! i’m drawing a line with regards to historical inspirations versus an idea of accuracy! (said line is a bit wobbly and shitty if you haven’t noticed, but i’m having fun.)

i decided to constrain myself with a few internal rules: one being the inspirations i draw on, and another main one being regarding masks. i decided to restrict mask wearing to as little as possible -- no shade to people who include masks in their gijinkas! i think they look wonderful with them And are lore relevant! but i felt like me, personally, using masks would keep me at times from being at the very top of my design experimentation game. so, as a little sort of fun challenge, i’m keeping away masks as much as possible in these people’s everyday wear. this means it is harder to keep silhouettes, but my priority is less 100% sticking close to silhouettes (though that is something to consider) and more evoking enough motifs and such to where they’re recognizable.

SO LET’S BREAK DOWN SOME DESIGNS!

Image Description: A reference sheet with various views of a humanized Knight. They’re a pale little humanoid thing armed with a shortsword, their skin and hair that same color of off-white, and always maintaining that same wide-eyed, small-mouthed, and neutral (yet almost determined?) look. They’re dressed in virtually rags from neck to boots, and all dark colors - navy blues, greys, dark brown leather, and even the deepest blacks. Charms are studded to their outermost cloak (and there seems to be a pair of vestigial, black-soaked wings under said outer cloak). They have a flat, square face, and a flat, square nose, though their corners are blunted. Their hair should be straight but it has gone long unbrushed; it stops in bangs at their forehead then cascades to their chin, where it hugs their jaw, especially at two points on the left and right where two ticks stick out on each side.

They can be seen also wearing headgear: a chainmail hood with old, yellowed horns poking out at either temple. They are also shown with their hair up in a little bun, or in two pigtails remniscient of their canon horns (one can thank Mato!). There is a little drawing of their exposed arm, showing how all their joints are harshly segmented, as if an insect or porcelain doll. In the corner, their dark shade chases after them. End ID.

an idea i wanted to play with for the knight -- and any of the vessels, for that matter -- is that of the uncanny. they are almost human! (as im approaching these humanizations with the idea of ‘human au’ and less so ‘everyone must be humanoid’, the higher beings are markedly less human here. ill get to that in a bit.) i decided to go for the concept that the knight is a living porcelain doll -- hollow, white, uncanny. they’re probably not shiny -- their surface probably feels like it was once porcelain smooth but is now ever so slightly abraded -- and theyre also not LITERALLY a doll. they do have a crackable exterior, yes, and are hollow, yes, but their segmented joints and such are less ‘doll’ and more ‘insect exoskeleton segments’. thank their dad (though i always thought he was more of a tapeworm / platyhelminth. but that aside--)

them being this humanoid non-human lends to some fun details! this is an example i like but is extraordinarily hard to communicate thru just stylized art: their eyes cannot close as they have been ‘carved’ that way & their pupils are just a hole into their void interior, and thus if you look at their face at an angle or profile you can see a little ridge / rim of the thin layer of their eye-white ‘porcelain’. they are also virtually dressed in rags, though the bottom cloak layer of those rags are wing-shaped, but still vestigial w/o the monarch wings, like in-game. and the two little hair-ticks on either side of their chin are meant to evoke their horns! :-)

Image Description: Various views of a humanized Hornet. She’s a thin, lithe person, with a long thin face wider at the top than the bottom and a thin chin. She has four eyes, and four arms. She has brown skin, with the exception of a patch of pale skin in the shape of her canon head right over her nose, with the ‘horns’ extending up into her scalp. There’s a flash of white coming from her forehead amongst her curly black hair, which is tied back into a bun by a hairtie shaped like two lightly curving pale horns. She has a long and pointy nose with a thin bridge, but it is crooked slightly. She largely has an unimpressed and stern look on her face.

She wears a bright red cloak with three weaverling buttons on the front, and white embroidery on the collar, back, and hem. The design on the back is a heavily stylized spider: a round body of eyes, with floral arms extending out from the junction between the body and the curving leaf-mandibles. Underneath her cloak she wears a white shirt with gold embroidery down the center (paired with a white neck stock) and a bodice that is black on the sides but gold and white in the center at her torso. Tied to her belt is a silver chatelaine with sewing supplies. She has red puffy sleeves, slitted to show white fabric showing through, and black forearm-length fingerless gloves. There are a few more sketches: one of her with a double-horned hennin (a scrapped design, or perhaps her formal wear), one of her as a child shouting excitedly for her ma, and a tiny her standing unimpressed next to a wide-eyed Knight. End ID.

hornet was kind of difficult, particularly because… of her head shape… but i fired out several solutions! the double-horned hennin (the funny two-cone hat) is from history, though the idea was scrapped as i imagine hornet in the present, as you see her, would not be of a mind to wear such finery. thus, i decided to give her a hairpiece shaped into horns, to evoke that silhouette. much more practical. (same idea goes with her patch of pale skin.)

as i mentioned this is a not-strictly-humans scenario, so i decided to splurge on the weavers and spiders and give them some differing anatomy, ie some extra arms and eyes. as a treat. i havent entirely sussed out (lol) the exact logic of her wear but i think it looks fine and is always subject to change. hornet wears things rather simple, for practicality reasons; and though her outfit is highly fictionalized (lmao) her garments under her cloak are somewhat based off of the portraits by cranach the elder. (all weaver clothings generally would feature repeating shoulder puffs. not leg-of-mutton style, but moreso in the image of the 1530s-40s. you'll see this more on herrah.)

the knight is a bit too ’young’ to have these features be quite apparent so they are the exception, but the trend with the ‘pale lineage’ is that of very pointed chins, long faces, and thin long noses. you'll see this on the hollow knight and the pale king, and you almost see this with hornet. she is still somewhat her father's creature, though he was never quite in her life.

Image Description: Various views of a humanized Quirrel. He's a portly brown man (with warm-toned skin) with a squat (but not comically so) face, a pointy and stick-out nose, freckles concentrated around the top of his nose and where his eyes meet, relaxed, monolidded black eyes, and straight black hair. His hair falls short onto his forehead and comes down his cheek in sideburns, but is pulled back into a low bun -- though it is usually covered by a dark grey-blue headscarf. He has silver plate armor on his upper body, upper arms, and over his thighs, with a sash winding 'round his waist and holding up his scabbard; he too wears long black gloves, and thigh-length leg gaiters over brown breeches. Covering his neck is a white neck stock. He has a bit of a hunched posture, his hips and neck both leaned forward; his belly is well-rounded, and his long legs are rather spindly.

He is also seen younger, before the fall of Hallownest. Here he has less wrinkles, though his face is much the same. His black hair is tied back in a headscarf (though actually short here); and he's clad in a segmented grey coat, high collar with a white cravat, green vest with rich gold embroideries, high knee stockings covering brown breeches, and over all that a segmented cropped tailcoat. He dresses pretty well, as befitting his station -- but not as well as he could (science gets messy!) End ID.

quirrel was both easy and hard. to mimic his segments i decided to give him plate armor -- reasons for this are fairly obvious i imagine LMAO (segments!) (though his armor isn’t based on or accurate to any particular armor style. this is because i do not like drawing armor.) for his outfit pre-fall of hallownest, i gave him some breeches and leggings, as is typical for his very regency / turn of the century inspirations, but those give him the effect of white legs. to sort of mimic the black legs he has in-game, i instead gave him black thigh gaiters! i could have gave him long boots (and i imagine he did have a pair) but 1 i liked the gaiters more 2 i forgor :(

a fun little add-on eagle-eyed viewers (?? i feel like a youtuber saying that) may spot is that the brooch on his neckcloth is an isopod shell! in some illustrations i draw this brooch directly on the cloth / above the knot and not on the draped part. no man would wear a stickpin / brooch like that on his tie in real life. i just don’t like drawing knots. younger quirrel also features more teals and greens in his design, along with gold accents, to fit more with the archive’s colors. (even in the present day, hidden under his headscarf, he uses a green ribbon to tie his hair back.)

honestly, he and monomon were the main reasons i decided to extend the period outside of late medieval. it’s their fault! not only did monomon fit really well to the dress silhouette of one of these later decades, but i really wanted quirrel to have a napoleonic / regency feel. this is largely because with the enlightenment there came the rise of natural philosophers and the scientific sorts of fellows, which have become sort of their own iconic archetype in the public consciousness (and in fiction. stephen maturin my beloved.) i thought that would fit him well, and so i went for it.

Image Description: Various views of a humanized Hollow Knight. They’re a very tall and svelte hollow humanoid, almost gangly in their proportions. They have a very elongated face with a straight, aquiline nose, large almond-shaped eyes, and a permanent expression that is all at once solemn, neutral, and melancholic. They look a lot like their father. They’re pale white on their skin and hair -- hair that is parted in the center at the forehead and tucked behind more hair, which cascades down to their torso when not tied up. Framing their face on either side are two slightly shorter bits of hair with three little spikes on each.

As the Pure Vessel, they stand straight and tall, completely cloaked in deep grey cloaks and holding a broadsword in firm gloved hands. Over their cloak is pale silver-white armor, with three-layered spaulders, a cuirass, and a helmet with large horns. Holding the Radiance within them, their cloak is torn and their armor and helmet are gone, with their hair splaying out loose. One of their boots is missing, exposing a segmented leg. Their right arm is gone, and a crack runs down their face down their forehead, into their eye, and down their cheek, exposing a bright yellow light from within. Still, they clutch their sword. In a corner of the image a tiny Hollow Knight looks with wide eyes at an even tinier, shouting Hornet. End ID.

the hollow knight’s design was fairly straightforward as i had figures out their siblings before them. even their armor -- which has been pointed out to be largely ornamental and they do not actually use it when fighting -- was easy to transpose. i was, admittedly, trying to avoid helmets (especially those that completely cover the face, though their’s isn’t) largely because i just dislike drawing them, but i felt i really HAD to with the hollow knight and so i just went for it !

i purposefully gave them a sort of gangly and out-of-proportion feel to them -- i like to think their grace is that of a stick-legged bird, like a heron or flamingo... someone stretched them in taffy help! /j but it also speaks to their true delicacy and fragility - both emotionally and literally. they’re a perfect hollow creation, but could very easily fall... or something like that !

but-- yeah, as i mentioned earlier, their design was a natural conclusion to come to from that of their relatives, so there’s not much new to say about them!

next, let’s look at the dreamers!

Image Description: The three dreamers, standing primly. In order from left to right there is: Herrah the beast, Lurien the watcher, and Monomon the teacher.

Herrah is a tall brown and broad-set, wide-shouldered woman. She has six eyes and an aquiline nose, and curly hair; on her head she wears a horned metal helmet and a dark blue bandanna covering the lower half of her face. From her neck there is a waist-length dark blue-grey cloak that cascades out behind her back. She wears a pale grey-blue doublet with a full skirt; on her arms there are rows of pinched pale fabric to look puffed, and her forearms are covered in dark grey fabric to the knuckles. She has striped grey spanish breeches and black hosen and shoes. One pair of arms is crossed, the other pair of arms rests on the hilt of a thin sword.

Lurien is a short brown man with an upside-down droplet shaped head. He has very short wavy hair and a long straight nose; a large teardrop shaped mouche is placed at the bridge of his nose and between his eyes. He has a navy blue cloak draped over his entire body; underneath he has a white circular millhouse ruff that hugs close to his neck, a black doublet, black breeches, and white hosen. He has two strings of beads: around his neck with a king’s idol, and in his hands -- which hold each other -- with a silver pomander.

Monomon is a tall black woman with an oval-shaped head, a wide nose, and a long, thin neck. She wears a rather unadorned teal gown with a bell shaped skirt, with a ruffled white petticoat seen underneath. At the top of the bell meeting the waist are four teardrop shapes in light cyan fabric emitting out, similar to those on a jellyfish. At the bottom of the bell are more cyan embroideries, this time of floral motifs in the general shape of jellyfish. Her sleeves are puffed leg-of-mutton style and then drape to the elbow, and she wears forearm-length white gloves. Her stomacher is green, with lighter green designs: four eye-like ovals, two smaller ones on top of the larger ones, with floral decorations around them. She has a dark blue headscarf, but seen coming out of it are four braids. End ID.

first to clarify: monomon’s braids are floating so you can see her gown easier! it’s not literal :-) second to clarify: in this sort of little half-baked au-thing i decided to make their masks a part of the spell. that is, their mask is one of the seals binding them to their slumber, and all that good rot. this means they follow my no-mask rule when not sleeping AND their masks remain relevant (namely, quirrel taking monomon’s mask to her.)

the dreamers are all based off of different centuries and it is pretty easy to tell with them standing side by side, hah! hell, they even go in order: herrah i largely based on the 1500s, lurien the 1600s, and monomon the 1700s...! that was unintentional.

herrah largely has this kind of puffiness to her body segments in the game, and so my first thought was immediately: 1500s style puffs. the sleeve puffs (as also seen on hornet, and they were often slitted. think the og disney snow white!) and also the very wide and puffy breeches (which i always thought were hilarious). unlike hornet’s hairpiece, i gave her a helmet to show her horns! i felt it fit her more than it did hornet -- maybe it’s just me, but i feel like hornet wouldn’t be one for metal armor.

however, i am feeling not 100% satisfied with her design as it is right now, though i do think it works on the levels of thought i put into the other designs. i dunno! i’ll change it when i feel like it -- such is the nature of these :-)

i decided to have him wear largely black to show status! normally in this time period richer folks would wear black - which may seem odd and plain to us but is rather telling of status as rich, deep black is quite hard to dye. however i still gave him a dark blue cloak to more allude to his ingame design.

ngl i put the least effort into lurien out of the 3 dreamers… sorry king i just don't care much about you comparatively… im pretty content with his design though! i decided to base him off of the more subtle and understated north europe fashions, as i felt they’d fit him. however, the bigass ruff is the biggest staple of this design for me (in my mind at least!) it’s drawn from the period and it also introduces a big round shape into his general design (when his in-game design is literally Round + drapey cloth LMAO)

i imagine he is devout from the few bits of in-game characterization we get -- hence the idol. he also has a pomander! they were medieval scent-objects thought to keep away miasma, or plague air. (they contained strong scents! it was for the same reason plague doctors stuffed their beaks with herbs: good scents keep away bad air! or so they thought.) i draw people with them a lot -- i just think they’re neat things and one of my favorite medieval objects :-)

as for the thing on his face - a mouche! what are mouches? i recommend you watch mina le's wonderful video on the subject -- she could explain it far better and in a more entertaining way than i.

i had SO MUCH FUN with monomon! (and i think that’s easy to see, hah!) dresses and gowns from the latter 1700s (though not yet regency like quirrel is -- dresses got kinda tube-shaped in regency) really do give the look of a jellyfish bell. a thin waist (comparatively speaking from the wideness of her dress -- though one can also look to the corset) would mimic monomon’s sort of thin neck (??) you see right before the grey-blue cloth in her in-game design. and since she isn't wearing a mask here, i put the imagery of the two pairs of eyes on her stomacher instead! wide puff and then pinching / thin segments is kind of the theme of her entire design - in her dress, in her sleeves, even in her neck and head. sort of bowling ball -esque i suppose! (sorry monomon.)

her braids being similar to her tentacles was an idea i believe inspired by @valdotpng​ 's depiction of her, and it's a great idea ! another allusion to jellyfish is the four little oval shapes i put on the skirt of her dress, to mimic that on jellyfish. (those are, in fact, their gonads.)

i haven’t drawn them, but if you or i were to draw them while in sleep then there would be cloth completely covering their shoulders and up, and the mask over where their face would be. just like in game !

last but not least i have some tentative sketches of some higher beings !

Image Description: Sketches of some higher beings.

The Pale King is a segmented worm with several rows of arms; he wears a rather simple white robe with embroidered trim. He has a svelte, high-cheekboned face, with a long aquiline nose and long straight hair with some pulled back in a bun -- his entire surface, skin and hair, is entirely pale white. Atop his hair he has a spiked crown. However, that human face is a false magical add-on; this ‘face’ is detachable, with the true head and mouth at the ‘crown’.

The White Lady is a large tree-woman; she has a oval face and delicate, pointed nose, but out of where her hair would be if she were a human extends out innumerable tree branches out in every direction. from the branches and to her face and downward are dignified wrinkles of bark. She is, however, restrained and bound in magical cloth.

Unn is a large hunched woman, her form covered almost completely in water plants that droop down to the lake she comes out of. Amongst the shadows of the fronds peeks a weary smile, though all else is covered. However, out of the plants peeks out two eyes on stalks. She is smiling down at a very small Knight.

The Radiance’s face is entirely obscured in darkness, and long hair flows down from her sun-ray crown. Out of her back come countless moth wings, large and small, each one covered in countless eyes of various sizes, though the lower wings turn into longer ray-like fronds. From under the wings comes a long-nailed hand, which is held up to her hair-covered chest. End ID.

outside of the pale king and mmmaybe the white lady im rather unsure about these...!!! radiance i’ve barely thought about -- so ill have to work on her a bit more ! this is more of a sketch of general motifs and the direction i wanna go in

as aformentioned i wanted to take more non-really-human designs for the gods. they’ve just got a different spin on their in-game motifs, with ‘humanoid’ added to the blender as well. for example-- the pale king is still the rather insectoid-wormoid-wyrm that he is in the original, but what he is trying to do here is appear like that of a man and not a common bug. (an extra thought tidbit: the lines on his face and wyrm body are meant to evoke the seals of binding, though they’re rather simplified here they’d be more detailed in an actual polished picture.)

since they aren’t meant to be human we get fun stuff like literal tree woman white lady, and all that !! it’ll be fun to think some more on it.

NOW, that’s it for the characters for this post! i’ll go over more if people want ‘em lmao but i cant let this post go on forever HAH....

a few more scrap thoughts:

1 there is a common thread amongst hallownest clothing despite the decade differences and the main thing is embroidery and just general decorative choices! i’ve tried to involve a mix of straight and curvy lines (heavy emphasis on lines in these designs in fact) along with floral motifs. though not a direct inspiration, try thinking about the swirling leaves of medieval manuscript decorations, paired with the swirling curves balanced with geometric / curved / straight lines of the ui menus and such in the game !

2 hallownest will still have insectoid iconography in its art and its architecture -- the gods they worship are still rather insectoid, after all. and there is still no reason they wouldn't use insects in their iconography the same way european cultures have historically used bird and mammal motifs. as for what their architecture would be -- i think in game is a perfectly fine, but also i’d tentatively throw the dart at gothic with some dashes of late romanesque.

3 my art, me drawing these designs, is horribly inconsistent. that’s fine i think! these are all for fun -- i think putting metric tons of thought into these are fun, as much as i think making tweaks depending on how i’m feeling is fun.

with ALL OF THIS IN MIND… i bid thee, reader, adieu! i hope you enjoyed my ramblings! id love to hear your own thoughts, questions, etc about all this! hopefully it made sense! (and if you wish to and are feeling either exceptionally charitable or exceptionally inspired, i give my express permission to draw all these, just please @ me so i can see it! i’m bad at social media so i don't like, check tags and stuff.)

:-) <3

happy birthday gromit