There’s power in one’s history.
About the Concept Art
You don’t spend two decades with characters without sketching them—mentally, on paper, in late-night Photoshop experiments best left unseen.
This isn’t all of it. Only what has enough dignity to share.
They started as concept art, the kind that floated around in my head for years.
But once Damien and Erik finally took shape—lifelike, the way I always envisioned (thanks Midjourney and Chat GPT)—they needed more than just faces.
They needed a world that felt real. The diegetic items you’ve sifted through—logos, documents, fragments of their world—are just an extension of that same impulse.
That’s how this all began.
Over time, both Damien and Erik naturally changed, same as I was doing.
Damien didn’t have facial hair in the beginning. Now? Damien wears a sharp stubble that mirrors his precision.
Erik did away with the soul patch (thank god), and his beard grew in with him—messy, full, just like he is.
And yes, Damien’s eyepatch lives on. Even though he’s (mostly) done away with it in the novel, he still wears it here—because that’s how he started.
And because subtlety wasn’t in my toolkit yet. His forever eye-conic phase reigns eternal.
Some designs evolve.
Some just linger, because they’ve earned their place.
And sometimes?
They become caricatures—little comic-strip versions of themselves, living in the margins of my brain. Moments that never made it into the novel, but still feel like they happened.
Some of those moments are here, too.
And Anne?
You might notice she’s not here in the same way of the other two.
That’s intentional.
Anne has always been a little harder to pin down—not because she isn’t real, but because she’s the space a lot of us step into.
She’s not just observed, she’s felt—in the silences, in the way others see her, in how she moves through this world.
Her presence is there. But like the story itself, she’s about what’s beneath the surface.
Because after this long, you don’t just write characters. You live with them.
Wilsonder is a contemporary literary novel rooted in emotional intimacy, identity, and restraint. But its world doesn’t end with the last page. The power of a story lives in its details—not just the written ones, but the ones that build the world around the characters. A signature on a document. A sharp tagline. A glance across the room that carries too much weight. The items collected here are part of that immersive design. Diegetic materials—documents, artifacts, and textures of a world just beneath the surface. The echo of a boardroom. The reverb of a concert venue after the headliner walks offstage. These pieces don’t just support the story. They extend it. Welcome to the Wilsonder world.
