In our full Perdido Street Station announcement we dived into the interior layout and typography. Here we’d like to share our approach to the artwork, and show how some of Jana Heidersdorf’s pieces developed from sketch to finished illustration.

Our edition of Perdido Street Station opens with a dramatis personae. 

Having this at the start accomplished two important things for us. To begin with, the obvious—readers get to immediately picture what the characters look like while setting up the look and feel of the world. For Deluxe and Lettered collectors, it’s the first artwork they see as the bindings are different from the printed cloth covers of the Collector’s Edition.

The second thing the dramatis personae allowed us to do was simply get the main characters out of the way. Bas-Lag is a world filled with all sorts of fantastic beings often in wonderfully strange situations, and we wanted to bring them to life with the interior artwork.

The Council

The scene where four of the main characters first encounter the Council is a perfect example:

“The rubbish was a body. A vast skeleton of industrial waste twenty-five feet from skull to toe. It sat, its back leaning against and permeable with the mounds of rubbish behind it. It raised stumpy knees from the ground. They were fashioned from enormous hinges where the arm of some vast mechanism had been torn by age from its casing. It sat with its knees raised and its feet on the ground, each one attached with a haphazard industry to the sprawling girder-legs.”

Ordinarily, we may have wanted to capture the four main characters in some level of detail along with the lich and Council. But having established those characters at the start, we were able to focus instead on the Council.

His Infernal Excellency—The Ambassador of Hell

“A heavy man in an immaculate dark suit had appeared behind the desk. He leaned forward slowly, his elbows resting on the papers that suddenly littered the desk.  He had experienced this before. Whenever Rudgutter blinked, for that infinitesimal moment, he saw the room and its occupant in very different forms. Through his eyelids, Rudgutter saw the inside of a slatted cage; iron bars moving like snakes; arcs of unthinkable force, a jagged, rippling maelstrom of heat. Where the ambassador sat, Rudgutter caught glimpses of a monstrous form. A hyaena’s head stared at him, tongue lolling. Breasts with gnashing teeth. Hooves and claws.”

Desperate times call for desperate measures, but even the Ambassador of Hell is going to pass on this one.

Shadrach

“Shadrach was staring intently into his mirrors. With his left hand, he was aiming behind him, pointing his thaumaturgic pistol at the slake-moth. Time slowed down as Isaac looked into his own mirrors and saw the dull metal pipe in the hands of the moth. He saw Shadrach’s hand, steady as the dead, clutching his flintlock, pointing it behind his own back.”

While Shadrach is human, we found the equipment and methodology for hunting slake moths fascinating. Slake moths feed on consciousness, so a helmet sucks his thoughts and emotions and funnels them away. And since looking at a moth in the eye causes paralysis, shooting one requires the use of a mirror while aiming directly behind you. Not easy.

The Escape

“The escape was a signal. There was a storm of wings. Falcons, moths, batkin, aspises, horseflies, parakeets, beetles, magpies, creatures of the upper air, little water-top skimmers, creatures of the night, the day and the gloaming burst from Isaac’s window in a shimmering explosion of camouflage and colour. The sun had sunk on the other side of the warehouse. The only light that caught the clouds of feather, fur and chitin was from streetlamps and shards of sunset reflected on the dirty river.”

What better way to capture fantastic creatures than to fill an entire page with them

The Kiss

“But for now he carefully thought of nothing as he saw the slake-moth turn its attention back to the woman held fast in its arms. He thought of nothing as he saw it force open her eyes with slender simian fingers and thumbs, heard her scream until she vomited with fear and then stop all her noises very suddenly as she caught sight of the flexing patterns on the slake-moth’s wings. Saw those wings gently widen and stretch taut into a hypnotic canvas, saw Barbile’s entranced expression as her eyes widened to gaze on those morphing colours; saw her body relax and the slake-moth drool in vile anticipation, its unspeakable tongue unrolling again out of that gaping mouth and snaking its way up Barbile’s saliva-spattered shirt to her face, her eyes still glazed in idiot ecstasy at those wings. Saw the feathered tip of the tongue nuzzle gently against Barbile’s face, her nose, her ears and then shove suddenly, forcefully past her teeth into her mouth (and Isaac retched even as he tried to think of nothing), thrusting at indecent speed into her face, her eyes bulging as more and more of the tongue disappeared into her.”

This piece was inspired by Klimt’s The Kiss. 

These are only five of the twelve full colour interiors (two of them being fold-outs) that go along with the two covers, eight part openers, and seven portraits in the dramatis personae. You can see all of them on the announcement page and public pre-orders open on June 25th at 12pm Eastern Time.