Illustrator Spotlight: Roberto F. Castro

I spent countless hours scrolling through ArtStation looking for the right illustrators for Eden's Rise. Hundreds of portfolios. And what I kept searching for, what I couldn't quite articulate at first, was an artist who didn't focus on objects. I needed someone who thought about space the way an architect does.

That's what I found in Roberto F. Castro, an artist who actually has an architecture background and often sees himself more as a designer than an illustrator.

Space as the Subject

A lot of what makes Eden's Rise special from a world-building perspective are the underground spaces. These are places that have never been seen before: vast caverns, carved cities, chambers that stretch beyond the reach of a lantern. The spaces themselves are a character in the story. I was looking for an illustrator who understood that, and Roberto did from the very beginning.

He's a Spanish concept artist whose credits include work on Marvel films and Amazon's Rings of Power. That background shows. His environments have the cinematic scale, combined with a human detail that makes them feel real and inhabited. When I found his portfolio, I knew immediately that I wanted to work with him. Images like his work on Rings of Power, King Arthur, and Pinocchio resonated instantly.

The Three Friends Approaching Empire City

Roberto created fifteen illustrations for Eden's Rise. Out of all of them, there's one I keep coming back to. It's the three friends approaching Empire City: the moment when they (and the reader) first see the full scale of what the dwarves have built underground.

What strikes me every time I look at it is how differently it imagines a dwarven city. This isn't the cramped, smoky, torch-lit hall you've seen a hundred times. It's something genuinely new: enormous and alien and beautiful. Roberto took everything I'd tried to put into words on the page and gave it a form I couldn't have imagined on my own. That illustration is, to me, the heart of what this collaboration was all about.

A Natural Partnership

Working with Roberto has been one of the genuine pleasures of making this book. From the first phone call, we were on the same page. We iterated quickly. I'd share my sense of a scene and he would come back with something that captured it. And then he took it further.

More than once, a detail he added to an illustration found its way back into the novel itself. That kind of creative feedback loop is wonderful. The art made the writing better.

You can see more of Roberto's work at ArtStation.

You'll be able to view Roberto's illustrations for this book once pre-order starts.