SHIVER Corporate poses a lot of questions about workplace ethics: ranging from the viability of hyper-aggressive sentient vegetables as food, to whether demonic entities from the bowels of hell itself make good coworkers. When it comes to creativity we can assume that Cornwell Consolidated would love to automate artistic output. They’d presumably employ all manner of algorithmically generated slop to hoodwink you into thinking they care about art, self expression, or people in general.
However, we’re not a fictional sinister mega-corporation, so we’ve chosen to let our artist Ben create the illustrations for SHIVER Corporate. We’ve even let him out of his pen to talk about his process below, and explain how he brings the world of Cornwell Consolidated to life with his visuals.
Puzzlemancer
"The Puzzlemancer's definition of puzzle is... very vague."
“Nearly every illustration I work on goes through the same process to make sure everyone is happy with the final output. Typically Charlie or Adam will brief me on a piece of artwork with a suggestion of the size it should be to fit into the book layout. Typically the larger full-page illustrations act to show a particularly dramatic moment in the story, and in some way will illustrate what it is actually about.
"I wanted to make sure the cat's eyes really reached into the reader's soul..."
We go through a process of refinement and feedback where the initial sketch is tightened up and any major changes are made. Typically once the sketch is signed off I will proceed to ink the piece in Procreate (shown here on the left) before exporting it to Photoshop to colour and finalise the artwork. At this stage I usually only get very limited notes about colour and sometimes other tweaks about the artwork."
Coworkers
"These two have names, backstories, everything. I think they really come alive in their own, simple way."
"I think this is my favourite piece of artwork for Corporate, and has popped up all over the place in our marketing. I think the brief included references to the movie Office Space and specifically asked to have the motivational poster. I love the dreary mundanity of having two demons wasting time at a water cooler as they count down the hours till a break. Even the colours are muted and there’s nothing sexy or exciting about this piece of art, even though it has two demons in it.
The briefing for how the demons should look was extremely defined, with a nice whiteboard sketch provided to me for how they should look anatomically."
"Note the emphasis on the ducky tie."
Hellknight
"The poorly planned presentation in the background serves to really ground the dark fantasy elements of this adventure in reality."
"This was a really fun one to work on, especially coming up with the design of the demonic knight. The brief was that he should resemble the musculature plate armour for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but with more spikes added. I decided to give him a modified version of a ‘frog mouth’ helmet, as I’ve always felt they looked very unusual and inhuman. I’ll never pass up an opportunity to work on an illustration with some cool armour in it."
Animatronic Endangerment
"The elevator doors were inspired by the Parable Games storage unit, that's true!"
"The Cornwell Consolidated Safety Squirrel is a mascot that has popped up all over SHIVER adventures for the last few years, and this was the first opportunity to see it in the flesh. However, because this is SHIVER something has gone deeply wrong and the helpful cuddly animatronic has gone on a rampage. Building the endoskeleton was an interesting challenge, as it needed to be something not quite human proportioned. We looked at a lot of reference images of horrible degraded animatronics and creepy robots from kids funhouses to help us land on this unsettling squirrel-terminator. I wanted to make the frame look rudimentary and industrial rather than something particularly high-tech, covered in ratty, trailing wires."
"Adam often writes a brief for weird animal hybrids. Much like his creations, I'm not sure it's all that safe inside his brain."
"We’ve got a huge amount of artwork ready to go for SHIVER Corporate, and we’ll keep on sharing them going forward. We’re particularly excited to show the cover when the time is right."
