Amir Zand’s Arkangel Concept Art for The Illustrated World of Mortal Engines
Artist Amir Zand revealed that he worked on The Illustrated World of Mortal Engines, the visual companion released around the time of the Mortal Engines film.
The book expands Philip Reeve’s world beyond the main novels, giving shape to traction cities, air routes, static settlements, strange machines, and the wider geography of Municipal Darwinism.
Zand’s contribution is especially interesting because it shows both an abandoned early direction and the final version of Arkangel, the vast predator city from Predator’s Gold.
Zand described the project as “a fantastic project” and shared one of his early sketches, noting that the piece did not make the final cut. Because the final illustration changed so much, he reworked the unused concept into a more futuristic image of ships passing through an Ark.
The Early Ark Sketch
The first image still carries traces of Mortal Engines: scale, movement, vast machinery, and ships passing through a monumental structure.
But it also feels cleaner and more futuristic than Reeve’s world usually wants to be. Mortal Engines works best when its machines feel lived-in, scavenged, repaired, rusted, named, and half-haunted by the old world.
That makes the unused sketch useful. It shows the boundary between broad science-fiction grandeur and the rougher, stranger texture needed for the Traction Era.
Design note: Mortal Engines should never feel too sleek. Its technology needs history, grime, civic identity, and the sense that people have been surviving inside these machines for generations.
Arkangel from Predator’s Gold
Zand later released the final version of Arkangel, his vision of the great traction city from Predator’s Gold.
Arkangel is one of the major threats of the second Mortal Engines novel. It stalks the frozen north and places Anchorage under pressure, turning the book into a colder, harsher extension of the Municipal Darwinism idea.
London may be gone after the first novel, but Predator’s Gold makes the bigger point: the system survives. Arkangel proves that the world does not need London to remain predatory.
What Arkangel Needs to Show
Arkangel is not just a big machine. It is a city with appetite.
The design needs to communicate mass, cold, distance, and inevitability. It should feel like something visible long before it arrives, a moving shape on the horizon that gives smaller cities time to understand they are doomed.
Zand’s version gives Arkangel that sense of scale. It feels less like a fast hunter and more like a moving cliff, a fortified city whose danger comes from size as much as speed.
That suits Predator’s Gold. Anchorage is fragile, hopeful, and trying to escape history. Arkangel is history catching up with it on tracks.
From Draft to Final Image
The shift from the early Ark sketch to Arkangel is the useful design story here.
The early image has atmosphere. Arkangel has function. It belongs to a specific book, a specific city, and a specific threat within the Mortal Engines world.
That is the job of good companion-book art. It does not just look impressive. It clarifies the setting.
In this case, the final image gives Predator’s Gold a stronger visual identity by showing Arkangel as a northern machine-culture monster, not merely another traction city.
