Ahoy, seadogs!
Today marks a special date in our calendars. On the 19th of May, 1845, the last voyage of HMS Terror and HMS Erebus began. Imagine being there, 179 years ago, in Greenhithe harbor, some 20 miles east of London. Two magnificent, sturdy ships, equipped with the most advanced technologies of the time—powerful steam engines and internal steam heating systems—rock gently in the morning breeze. Are you imagining it? Is the picture you see white like fresh sails, blue like the ocean, and bright like hope? Great. Because today we will talk about its exact opposite—the depiction of darkness and desperation. The art of Terror: Endless Night.
Paint me like one of your Victorian paintings
The first step to developing the unique art style of Terror: Endless Night was research, and tons of it! We wanted to make our style as close to the art from the époque as possible, like each picture was painted by a talented officer who had seen it with his own eyes. It was not unheard of for the high-ranking and well-versed crew members to write diaries or sketch, even with fingers numb from the cold.
We took a lot of inspiration from the Realist works from the latter part of the century to portray the life of a ship stuck in arctic ice—stripped of idealism, faithfully capturing moments of both everyday mundanity and the great horrors of the expedition’s many possible fates. All immortalized with a brush, and you can see those very brushstrokes!
The second part of the homework our artists did revolved around historical accuracy. Uniforms and personal accessories of the sailors, furnishings and construction of the ship, situations our crew might have found themselves in—it all had to match what we’ve seen in historical sources. Dozens of paintings, illustrations, daguerreotypes, preserved items and artifacts, or even photographs of the wrecks of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror gave us all the details we needed. Did you know museum collections hold such treasures as the silver table fork with Captain Franklin’s crest?
Palette of Perils
In Terror: Endless Night, the colors tell a story of their own. It is a grim tale of the faint light of hope trapped in a dark, frozen hell. Omnipresent darkness and creeping cold slowly, but unstoppably, like icebergs pressing against the ship’s hull, intend to crush all sources of warmth and life.
That’s the impression we are aiming at, using a palette of dark blues and greys that surround the scene at all times like a trap with no exit. Regardless of whether inside or outside the ship, we want them to seem like they are always creeping toward the center of the screen.
Luckily, there are safe harbors amid the dark—sparse, often singular spheres of oranges and yellows, flickering sparkles of hope that it could all still end well. This contrast of warmth against the cold is a prevailing motif in our art. One intensifies the other: the warm palette makes the cold seem even colder, and vice versa. You can almost feel the warmth beaming from the center of the picture here, but you can also sense the creeping cold on its edges. It’s a never-ending struggle.
While the merciless cold held the title of the archenemy of the 19th-century polar expeditions, fire was both the savior and the tormentor. Wooden ships, even frigid, if set ablaze, could turn the frozen hell into a raging inferno in mere seconds. Keeping an open flame was therefore considered a mortal sin among sailors and severely punished. What a predicament to find yourself in, isn't it? No wonder that it causes the heat of another kind to rise—a fever.
Somewhere there, between the fire and ice, are people. Prone to the inflammation of spirit and coldness of heart. But also capable of cooling down their primal, selfish instincts and sharing with others the little warmth they have left. This is the art of survival in Terror: Endless Night.
That’s all we’ve had for this devlog. All that’s left to say now is that we really want to connect with our fans, so make sure to leave a comment and say hi! If you have any questions, you can also go ahead and drop them in the comment section, and as always, we encourage you to tap that Wishlist button, because it lets us know that even if you’re a lurker, you’re here and you’re interested in what we have to show. Also, we want to post these regularly, so stay on the lookout for more devlogs, seadogs!
Fair winds,
Unseen Silence