Art Break: Lost Land

I wanted to share something a little different today.

While working on the book, there’s a scene that’s been especially vivid in my head—the moment when Dain, Elise, Liora, and Garrick finally crest the rise and see the lost land laid out before them. It’s one of those pauses in the story where everything goes quiet for a second and the scale of what they’ve stumbled into finally sinks in.

I needed an ad banner for the book’s Amazon page, so I decided to paint that moment.

This wasn’t meant to be a big, polished piece. The goal was speed. I did a quick digital painting to block in the composition, mood, and lighting—just enough to capture the feeling I wanted. After that, I ran it through Stable Diffusion to gloss it over and push it toward a finished look without spending days rendering tiny details no one would ever see at banner size.

It was very much a “get in, get it done, move on” kind of thing.

But somewhere along the way, it clicked.

The final image ended up matching the scene in my head almost perfectly—the sense of scale, the quiet awe, the feeling that the world just got a lot bigger and a lot stranger all at once. It’s still just an ad banner, and it was never meant to be anything more than that, but I liked it enough that it felt wrong not to share it.

So here it is. A quick glimpse into that moment of discovery. Four characters, a long journey behind them, and a land they weren’t sure still existed suddenly stretching out in front of them.

Sometimes the fast, utilitarian pieces surprise you. This one did.