Written descriptions of characters, whether in stories or as documents in their own right, often conjure different visualizations in the minds of different readers. For some people, particularly if they are not visually oriented, it may be difficult to arrive at any clear mental images. Even the author may have only a hazy or general idea of what his (or her) creations look like.

In some degree that’s the situation with the main characters of Anasazi’s Road. To help me clarify their appearance in my own mind, I’ve been commissioning portraits from a variety of artists and looking at the results. Sometimes an artist suggests, through details in an image, a new idea I hadn’t considered previously. Sometimes an artist misses the mark—but even that can be useful, because it forces me to figure out why, dredging thought processes up from my subconscious into the light where I can examine them.

This set was commissioned from  sickeleye. They are all very good pieces of art, especially considering they were executed at lightning speed. On the other hand, that also meant there was no time for client feedback to correct any elements that went astray, and some did.

Her version of Tom is spot-on, perhaps the best I’ve seen so far. Yes, he’s that much taller than the two girls; the images are shown roughly to scale.

Ana’s build is right and her face is, correctly, quite plain, but her hair is so-so; to judge from the accumulating evidence, that hair is by far the most difficult single element of the three characters. Normally Ana prefers T-shirt and jeans for casual wear, though I did adopt that outfit for the last scene of the first novella, Anasazi’s Rubicon, in which she dresses up a little for the housewarming party in the Victorian to which she and Tom move.

Angie is significantly wider of the mark in nearly every way, demonstrating how much room for interpretation there is in even the tightest description. It’s a good character portrait, well worth much more than the purchase price—it’s just not really Angie.