The Emperor's Soul
This page contains my lego fan art of The Emperor's Soul by Brandon Sanderson. The Emperor's Soul is a stand-alone novella that takes place in the same world as Elantris, and it is part of Sanderson's Cosmere universe. Brandon Sanderson's official introduction to this novella can be found here, along with sample chapters and some official artwork.
Spoiler warning: this album has spoilers for the entirety of The Emperor's Soul.
You can view the files either through the gallery below or the individual image links just below the gallery. Below that, I have included a discussion of the build and some of the customization involved, followed by copyright and use information. If you're on mobile, the menus are at the bottom of the page.
Gallery
Individual image links
- Prologue
- Day 2: questioning Shai
- Day 2: Emperor Ashravan
- Day 3: the Bloodsealer arrives
- Day 3: the Bloodsealer at work
- Day 5: Shai at work
- Day 12: Shai and Gaotona
- Day 17: Frava
- Day 30: Shai and Gaotona
- Day 42: Shai at work
- Day 58: Frava
- Day 59: Strikers on guard
- Day 70: stamping Gaotona
- Day 76: the mural
- Day 85: Shai at work
- Day 97: the Bloodsealer's letter
- Day 98: Zu
- Day 98: Shai stamps palace livery
- Day 98: the palace
- Day 98: Shai and Ashravan
- Day 98: Gaotona returns the essence marks
- Day 98: Shaizan and Zu
- Day 98: Skeletals
- Day 98: Shaizan and the Bloodsealer
- Day 98: Gaotona and Ashravan
- Day 101: the Imperial Seat
- Day 101: a work of art
About this build
There isn't that much fan art of The Emperor’s Soul out there, aside from the lovely art by Botanica Xu. (If you haven’t seen her work, she's one of the most popular Brandon Sanderson fan artists out there, and I recommend you check out her work.) Since I prefer to make artwork of scenes that haven't already been rendered visually, this was something I've wanted to do for a while.
The various heads I used for Shai are custom printed rather than decals, since it is hard to mix light and dark colors in decals without ugly artifacts. The other custom parts, namely the soulstamps, the painting, the heads used for the Bloodsealer, and the forehead seals on the skeletals, were all done with Waterslide decals, since those were either on white lego elements or only used black ink.
The scene of Shai outside of the Imperial Seat on day 101 required forced perspective. I didn't want to build an entire city for one shot, so I built the foreground at regular scale and the background at microscale, with two separate bases. I then elevated the foreground build on some lego boxes (I should've taken photos of the setup, it was pretty janky), placed the camera close to the foreground build, reduced the depth of field in the camera, and moved the background away until it was somewhat out of focus.
The photos I used for the backgrounds outside of windows are all from Maui and Kauai. I use photos I've taken there as backdrops in a lot of my fan art. The sunrise behind Gaotona was taken at the summit of Haleakala. We had to get up around 3:00 for that. Worth it.
Legal stuff
The artwork on this page is copyright 2017 by Richard Martin. The source material is copyright by Dragonsteel Entertainment, LLC (Brandon Sanderson's company).
Feel free to download the images in this gallery and to use them for non-commercial purposes. If you wish to re-post them online, you may do so as long as you give me credit by either citing me (Rick Martin) as the artist, linking to this site, and/or linking to my Facebook page.
I am not affiliated with Brandon Sanderson or Dragonsteel Entertainment in any way. This page is in compliance with Brandon Sanderson's official policy on fan art.