Northanger Abbey: Polite Society Designs

For the last year my big art project has been a commission by the amazing Veldi Games to create character illustrations for a new card/board game they are creating based on Jane Austen. This of course was RIGHT UP MY ALLEY because everyone who knows me knows I am a huge Jane Austen nerd. I happily spent several months deciding on how each character in a set of 52 from the main six Austen books would look, and then researching period appropriate clothing. The game, called Polite Society, involves creating a dinner table full of guests out of the character cards, and should be a lot of fun! It's on Kickstarter now, so if you love Jane Austen and/or games, consider supporting it here.

Here are my character designs for Northanger Abbey. These were some of the first ones that I worked on. It's always interesting to see which characters ended up being difficult for me to illustrate - I drew several versions of Isabella Thorpe, despite not having a huge amount of opinion going in about how she should look. I also sourced the characters' clothing from the 1790s, since Northanger Abbey was originally a piece of Jane Austen's juvenilia and written in that decade.

If you want to see a video of my artistic process on Marianne from Sense and Sensibility, check it out on Veldi Games' Polite Society page