Building an imaginary tower

I’m not just writ­ing the words for my book; I’m doing the illus­tra­tions, too. So I thought I’d walk you through the process. This is the most recent one, which I did on Sat­ur­day afternoon.

Quick back­ground: San Francisco’s Sutro Tower is already pretty extra­or­di­nar­ily spooky, so it’s not much of a stretch to think it might play a small-​​but-​​important role in a story about the dig­i­tal and the occult.

Like a lot of things in my fic­tional San Fran­cisco, it’s rec­og­niz­able but… off. It has a dif­fer­ent name. And it looks a bit different—so I thought it would be a fun thing to illustrate.

Here’s how I went from head to page. (Fair warn­ing: this is a very tall post, with lots of images, so get ready to scroll.)

Read on…