Author: Queenie Chan

Sketches: Adelaide Comic-Con

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So, Adelaide Comic-Con has come and gone, and I spent the whole two days sitting at my booth and talking to people. Thanks to all the people who came by to talk to me, and especially a big thanks to people who brought books for me to sign. I managed to sign more than a few copies of each of my books, so that was really nice. Apart from that, I just mostly sat and did sketches I then sold, in-between talking to people (since I don’t go to conventions much, nor really sell art prints or anything there). This was the first convention where I’ve had a table to myself (previously I shared all my tables), so it’s also the first time I sketched much of anything in such an environment.

I took pictures of some of the art I did, thanks to the new iPhone I have. Since the convention went on for 2 days and was pretty tiring, you can kinda see the quality of the art (and the photography) dribble down through the sketches. Conventions are strange places to be drawing in… some people seem to do well in those kind of environments, whereas I found it overwhelming. There’s alwas people coming and going to talk to you, and generally it’s quite loud and noisy. Either way, I decided that drawing characters from The Legend of Zelda will make it easier for me, and so it was. Drawing Link always calms me down.

 

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Doodled this pic of Link on the back of one of those hotel writing pads...


 
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Zelda was also doodled on the back of a hotel pad... random pieces of paper, teehee.


 
mary2

A fan of "The Dreaming" asked me to draw Mary Spector! Now that was someone I haven't drawn for years!


 
pokemon

I was asked to draw two pokemon eating a mountain of food. Pokenmon experts should know who the stars of this picture is...


 
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People bought Link so I had to draw another Link.


 
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Zelda was bought up too, so I drew another Zelda.


 
pikachu

A french-themed Pikachu for someone's sketchbook


 
link3

Let me just say that Link was uber-popular... I had to finish this one quick because someone wanted it when they saw me drawing it.


 
bluebeetle

I think one of these guys is called the "Blue Beetle"? This was something about April Fool's Day?


 
boy

I drew this pic of a cute little blonde boy. I was so tired by then I could barely photograph this one properly.


 

Pokeball

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I’ve finally finished chapter 3 inks, and will be starting chapter 4 inks soon. Don’t forget that I’ll be going to Adelaide Comic-Con this weekend, and that House of Odd came out last Tuesday!

This week I show you one of the first things I crocheted, since it was so easy. It’s a pokeball, and I got the free pattern from Wolfdreamer’s blog. This particular pattern makes a rather large ball (the size of your first) at 42 stitches, so for my version I decided to shrink it down to 30 stitches. I found that 30 stitches maximum produced a pokeball that is more like the size it’s supposed to be (ie. fits into the cup of your hands).

 

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Step 1: Crochet the top half of the pokeball. I stopped at 30 stitches though, since I felt that was the "normal" size for a pokeball.


 
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Step 2: Add the black parts then the white parts. You do this much in the same you chance colours during crocheting.


 
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Step 3: Crochet the little black and white buttons in the middle of the pokeball, then sew them onto the ball.


And here we have two pokeballs, one 42 stitches wide, and one 30 stitches wide. You can see the size difference.

 
pokeball

House of Odd

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This week I started on inks for chapters 3-4 of Small Shen, and also finished my short story for our Bento Comics Peter Pan anthology (which I’ll talk about in a few weeks). I’m also going to Adelaide Comic-Con as a guest om the 30th March – 1st April, but this post is entirely dedicated to what’s happening next week, which is…

 

Odd Thomas 3 - House of Odd

 

This is the third Odd Thomas book I’ve done, titled “House of Odd” and it’s coming out next Tuesday on the 20th March, 2012 (I posted some art from this a while back). This book was drawn in 2011, and like the other two books, In Odd We Trust and the #1 New York Times seller Odd Is On Our Side, it focuses on the adventures of psychic fry-cook Odd Thomas, star of Dean Koontz‘s best-selling prose novel series of the same name. This book is adapted from a script by Dean and Landry Q. Walker, and I thank the both of them for their fine work!

NB.I also got to thank Lala of Review Carnival, and Allen of Jazma Online for their interviews of me! Lala’s is a general interview, whereas Allen’s deals specifically with House of Odd!

 

  • For North American Readers: You can buy it here off Amazon.com
  • For International Readers: You can buy it here off BookDepository.com, which has free international shipping.

 

What’s the Story?
The story of House of Odd once again has Odd and Stormy trying to solve a supernatural disturbance, but this time it’s a disturbance with a difference! It occurs at the site of a supposedly haunted house, which has just been bought and renovated by Nedra Nolan, a friend of Ozzie Boone. Ozzie recommended Odd to Nedra as the resident ghost-busters of Pico Mundo, but Nedra isn’t impressed – she’s an ex-Hollywood producer who instead hires her own (and therefore competing) band of ghostbusters to figure the house out. However, neither Odd nor the ghostbusters are prepared for what will actually happen in the house…

 

Odd Thomas is a psychic fry-cook who can see dead people, who lives in the Californian town of Pico Mundo. Accompanied by his ass-kicking, gun-toting girlfriend Stormy, he often tries to help the forlorn spirits he encounters by finding their murderers. This involves getting into a fair bit of danger. Luckily, Odd has many (living) friends, many of them quite odd themselves, who help him in his quest. It’s a rather charming, off-beat take on the supernatural, with moments of action and suspense, as Odd finds himslf the target of some truly nasty people as he tries to uncover their nefarious deeds.

 

Here I Show Off Some…
I’ve got to end this with a picture of something Dean sent me for my work… signed, numbered, first-edition copies of the first 4 Odd Thomas prose novels!! It was so kind of Dean to make this generous gesture, so in return I sent him back some original pages from House of Odd. Mind you, I’ve never owned any first edition books before, and had no idea that they were so big. They’re beautifully-printed, leather-bound and the size of a Britannica volume. Here’s some pictures to share with the Internet. No doubt this is worth a lot!!

 

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The red book is “Brother Odd”. It has the prettiest cover design!!

 

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The lightening bolt one is “Odd Hours”. The green one is “Odd Thomas”, the silver “Forever Odd”, and the other red one is “Brother Odd”.

 

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The inside covers of these first-edition books are beautifully illustrated, as are the chapter openings. In “Brother Odd”, all the text on the pages were in the shape of a church window. I thought it was a real nice touch!

 

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There’s only 300 of each of these in th world!! (Well, 500 of “Odd Thomas”, 300 of the rest)

 

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This was actually sent to me in December 2011, but I thought I’d save it until “House of Odd” came out to show the world. So here it is!!

 

Twisted Tales – Dorothy

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It’s an early post this week, and I have some really exciting news! No, it’s not House of Odd coming out in 2 week’s time, though that is plenty exciting in itself. It’s the first, full-length music video of Dorothy, the first single of Yunyu‘s Music-Manga-Animation collaboration: Twisted Tales. I previously wrote about the trailer here, but now I can show you the full video, beautifully animated by the talented Thai animators The Commonists!

 

 

Dorothy is available on iTunes and Bandcamp:

 

What is Twisted Tales?

Twisted Tales is the name of Yunyu’s music album, but it’s not that simple. The story is about what happens when fairy tales come to live in our world (along with the various issues that living in our world has), but it’s not just a music album. Below, Yunyu and I talk about Twisted Tales in our introduction video:

 

 

As a manga artist (and a long-time friend of Yunyu), I had the biggest hand in shaping the visual side of Twisted Tales – it’s quite unlike any other project I’ve worked on, and I had some great fun with the material, some of which was quite unexpected. For example, I didn’t expect to do any photo-shopping of Yunyu’s photos for this album, but in terms of publicity shots, it kinda fell within the territory. Below is a shot I photoshopped for the release of Dorothy. I discovered a previously unknown talent for this sort of thing! It was fun to indulge too!

 

Yunyu-milkyway

Click to enlarge. I will be posting a step-by-step tutorial for how I photoshopped this picture later on.


 

The Art of Twisted Tales

I designed the character of Dorothy, which the animators The Commonists then brought to life. Apart from that, my job was to design the covers for the CDs and DVDs, which unfortunately is only available as part of a press kit. The idea is that people are no longer buying CDs, so at least for a while, you won’t be able to buy the CD covers and CD I designed for Dorothy. But that doesn’t mean I won’t show you all that nice art! Here’s a pic of it below:

 
dorothy-covers
 

As for the actual art style, I settled on it a long time ago. It’s rather bright and colourful, but I feel that for a story about twisted fairy tales, that cheeriness works fine as a counterpoint to the dark subject matter. I would cite South Park as inspiration – childlike-graphics, but with mature content. It’s incongruous, like a subversion of childhood imagery, which I liked very much. Dorothy itself is a rather dark song, and the sequence of events that happen in this 6-panel story of Dorothy’s journey through space reflects that. The cutesy art brings that out even more so.

Since the theme of both Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz was travel, I decided to use airmail letters/parcels/stamps as part of the jacket design. The 5 stamps show Dorothy travelling along the yellow star road, meeting the scarecrow (Planet Brain), the tin man (a spaceship), and the lion (constellation of Leo) before she meets the giant blue star – aka the Wizard of Oz. The wizard turned out to be a disappointment, as he was in the original – in this case, the wizard is Death itself. You find out Dorothy’s fate in the final panel, which not coincidently is also the CD itself.

 

Dorothy-CD-jacket

Click to enlarge.


 
Dorothy-CD
 

I created a separate cover for the DVD version. Originally this wasn’t meant to exist since the discs were meant to be 2-in-1 or something, but people got confused. So this was whipped up at the last minute, so people can see they’re a DVD and a song on a CD.

 

Dorothy-DVD-jacket

Click to enlarge.


 

That’s it from me, for Dorothy. The next song in the album will be coming down the pike in a few month’s time, so stay tuned!