u/Smartstift

The three witches in Tollmire, the dice roguelike I'm making, are cut

from this print: "Witches: five silhouetted figures", an aquatint by

Matthew Dubourg after silhouettes cut by Miss Barbara Anne Townshend,

published by Edward Orme in London on 1 September 1815. The Wellcome

Collection has a high-resolution scan.

What I like about it: she didn't draw those figures, she cut them out

of black paper. The plate comes from her own book, "The Art of Cutting

out Designs in Black Paper", and her advice in the introduction was to

"cut the general outline in a rough manner, and correct and finish

them afterwards". Which is exactly what I ended up doing with her

figures, 211 years later, with a mouse. In the game the witch changes

as the tolls get steeper — three of her five figures, one for each

third of a run.

The reeds and bulrushes at the edge of the bog come from Otto Wilhelm

Thomé's "Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz" (1885),

plates 44 and 65, drawn by Walter Müller. Cutting those out was the

hard part, because the plants run right off the edge of the plate.

Not everything is that old: the moon is NASA's photo of the 10 August

2014 supermoon, taken by Bill Ingalls.

About Townshend herself I found very little — Sue McKechnie's

silhouette reference calls her "an extremely able cutter, talented and

inventive", and the earliest trace of her is a scrapbook she gave her

god-daughter in 1805. If anyone knows more about her, or whether the

1815 edition of her book is digitised anywhere, I'd like to hear it.

The full plate, 1815 (Wellcome Collection).
Three of the five witches, cut out for the game. The bog witch gets older as the tolls rise.
Common reed, plate 63 in Thomé's Flora (1885), drawn by Walter Müller.
Recoloured for the Steam store art.
Nothing was redrawn. In the game. Moon: NASA/Bill Ingalls. Background photo: Michael Savidge, CC BY 4.0, cropped and toned.