So I had this weird deja-vu thing that hit me recently, as I was flipping through an old sketchbook, looking for a blank page. I found a bunch of illustrations from about 6 years ago, and they don't suck. I mean, they're not up to my current standards, sure, but they're actually not bad

As you may know, I am a mad, mad fan of Terry Pratchett, and espescially The Discworld. I read my first Disc novel back in '89, an import copy of Equal Rites, and I was hooked. Since then I've collected every Disc novel available (in fact, some have become so tattered and worn from repeated readings that I need to replace them), over 30 books and he's still going strong, as sharp as ever.

His newest Discworld book, Going Postal , hits the streets here in just a week, so in celebration of the new and my love for the old, I thought I'd share with you a little something I did back in 1998.

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I so rarely do fanart, but for Pratchett I can make a wide exception. I created these before I discovered the work of Paul Kidby, who is without a doubt the best Discworld artist to ever illustrate dwarf bread, and so I had no visual representations for the various characters who already existed so vibrantly on the page. One of the cool things about a well-written character is that they're so easy to illustrate... they're already alive, in a sense, so all you have to do is draw them as you see them. I guess it's a testament to the writing of Pratchett that my character designs were actually not far off at all from Kidby's which are pretty much perfect (I think he makes Carrot look a bit too thick-headed, personally).

This is one of four pages I drew, each with two of my favorite characters. I'm most fond of the City Watch series, because they largely take place in Ankh-Morpork, Pearl of Cities (keeping in mind that a pearl, while beautiful, is at the same time a piece of irritating shit covered in mucus). You can keep your Rivendells and Bag-Ends, your Shadowdales and Waterdeeps... if there was one fantasy city I wish I could visit, it'd be Ankh-Morpork. It has a smell.

And at least I know enough to stay out The Shades.

This was also part of my "notebook" phase, when I had a thing for drawing sketches and then surrounding them with little notes and such... emulating really interesting "journal" type sketchbooks which I see a lot in movies and so on, but rarely in real life. It takes a lot of work to throw on a ton of extraneous text! I tried to paraphrase Pratchett's writing as well as I could, but it's quite likely that I've hit a wrong detail (for instance, I was very worried for a while that Carrot's last name was Stronginthearm, not Ironfoundersson). Don't hesitate to correct any screwups I've made.

Yes, I totally ripped the helmet from Asterix.