Legacy: The Saga Begins

The epic poem Legacy, by Michael Pietrack follows the journey of Abel, a honeybee living at Primdale Hive. Abel must go on a quest to save his queen bee, meeting new friends and foes and learning more about himself and bee-kind along the way. Here, I’ve laid out the process by which I illustrated the images for Legacy, starting with initial sketches, rough ideas, character designs, and finally some of the final images.

Above: My first impression of what Primdale Hive could look like. The final image is based on this sketch, but it went through a few changes.

Below and Right: Developing the look of the main character. He is a honeybee, but we wanted him to have human characteristics such as an emotive face, an upright stance, and, eventually, clothing.

How human do I make Abelbee look? We chose to use head 6 as a base for further edits.

The final design for Abelbee!

Now that I figured out how these characters are going to generally look, I started developing more bees, as well as some of the various species Abel encounters along his journey.

Primdale Hive - Development

Primdale Hive was one of the first locations we needed to visualize, as it was a contender for a cover design. I came up with an initial sketch of the large White Oak tree (the first image at the top of this page), then introduced some new ideas and layouts for the castle-like hive, finally landing on the design of the illustration on the above-right.