Image Credits
A little about the images you’ll find across Unmarked Bounty, where they came from, and why I'm using AI-generated illustrations for now.
Unmarked Bounty is a one-person, independently published project. There’s no company, design department, or funding.
If money were no object, I’d love to commission an illustrator to create some custom artwork for the site. There are so many amazing artists on Fiverr, and I would love to support one of them.
However, that's not financially possible yet, so for now, almost all the illustrations have been created with the help of ChatGPT's image-generation tools, with some of the earliest images created using Google Gemini.
I develop the concepts, art direction and detailed prompts, then generate and critique iterations, identify the inevitable strange hands and extra pieces of wood, ask for different colors or more contrast, revise the prompts, and keep going until I have something that fits the visual world I’m imagining.
Before going down this route, I also spent a lot of time (way too much time!) searching stock photography sites, free image libraries and other online collections.
There is an extraordinary amount of beautiful work out there. The main problem was that I often couldn't find the particular images I had in my head, or the ones that I came across didn't fit together as a consistent visual identity.
Generative tools have allowed me to develop a small but cohesive visual world specifically for this publication, featuring: wayfinders, cartographers, navigators, readers, mysterious anonymous travellers, and desks covered in maps and instruments.
The image that helped me to get underway
A massive shout-out to Arturo Portillo on Unsplash, whose illustration became the avatar for Riley McKenna (a pen name).
It became the inspiration for a much larger visual language across the site.
I searched through Arturo's extensive Unsplash collection hoping I might find more images that could inhabit the same world. I haven't found any others that are quite right for Unmarked Bounty yet, but his original illustration remains a very important part of the site's visual DNA.
Thank you, Arturo.
Other visual references
A few of the AI-generated illustrations on Unmarked Bounty were developed using other existing illustrations as visual references for things such as pose, composition, clothing, objects, color relationships or general visual direction.
The reference images aren't intended to be reproduced, they're used as starting points for developing new illustrations matching the Unmarked Bounty visual style.
Where I've used an identifiable reference image, I'll credit and link to its original source here wherever possible.
More credits will be added as the visual library grows.
Unmarked Bounty is an experiment, and documenting the tools, constraints, and compromises is basically the whole point.
Right now, my resources are mostly time, curiosity and a very small budget. I'm using the tools available to me to make something distinctive without allowing the pursuit of perfect graphics to swallow the time I need for the thing that matters most, writing.
And if this little anonymous newsletter eventually makes enough money that I can email an illustrator and say, “Hello! Would you like to draw a cartographic universe for me?” that will be a very good day indeed!
Riley.
(a pen name, for safety reasons)