Small Shen: Out in December 2012, with Book Trailer!

Posted onDecember 16, 2012September 14, 20131 Comment

Update: Small Shen is an ideal Xmas present, and #4 on the SciFi Charts! You can also read a 50-page extra from the book here! Click the “Download” button to download onto your computer, or you can download it zipped from here. We also created a book trailer for it! Check it out!

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Hi everyone! My next book Small Shen (from Harper Collins Voyager), will be out in Australian bookstores this month! I was super-excited when I got this book – the art was printed on high quality paper, and it just looks fabulous. As you can see from these pictures below, the book is a mix between prose and comics.

This is a collaboration with best-selling author Kylie Chan, and includes a free song (book soundtrack!) by my friend and long-time collaborator Yunyu, called Butterflies, that can be downloaded from a link at the back of the book.

The song ‘Butterflies’ by Yunyu will be delivered via QR tag, with instructions, at the back of the book.

In Australian bookstores in December, 2012!

Small Shen – Colour Art

Posted onSeptember 15, 2012September 14, 2013

Hi all! I’ve been away in Hong Kong for a while, and I had a pretty good rest there. Once I got back, however, I found myself besieged with problems. Firstly it was a stomach bug, then it was a computer virus, and now it’s a minor health problem. All-in-all, none of these things are serious, and they’ll all eventually be fixed… it’s just that it’s annoying, that’s all.

What I’m doing right now: Working on finishing a “Legend of Zelda” fanfiction I started years ago, in 2006 and posted on my DeviantArt account. I feel I must finish it, so I’m going to do this before I start work on my next book. Arrgh!! Nose to paper! I’ve made good progress though, and so far there’s 89 finished pages. I will post the first chapter in early October, once Yunyu comes back from overseas (she is writing music for some of the locations in the fanfic).

Colour Art for “Small Shen”: The book’s coming out this Xmas, and this week I show some colour art I did of some of the characters from “Small Shen” a while ago – namely Gold and Jade. A composite of these two pictures form the site banner for “Small Shen”, but here you can see the originals separately, to see what they’re like. The colouring styles for both are quite different, and it was a fun experiment.

Here’s the composite image for the “Small Shen” cover

Here is just Jade alone. I spent a lot of time getting some Mucha influence into her hair, and it’s too bad it’s obscured by Gold on the cover.

Here is male-Gold, and female-Gold. Male Gold appears only in the comic-prose part of “Small Shen” (his is a character who identifies mostly as male anyway, being a stone spirit without any gender originally), but female gold appears in the prose sections.

Small Shen is Finished!

Posted onJuly 17, 2012September 14, 20134 Comments

But first, here’s an interview with me from the lovely Rowena Cory Daniells, a famous fantasy author. Fantasy authors unite! Also, I’m being featured in Cordite 39, the “Jackpot” issue!

I’ve also finished Small Shen, the prequel to Kylie Chan’s best-selling “White Tiger” Chinese fantasy series. I busted my spleen to finish it by the end of July, and now that I’ve finally made that date, I just feel exhausted. Not so much by Small Shen, but by having done House of Odd (the last Odd Thomas graphic novel) and this book back-to-back. The last time I did something similar was with The Dreaming v3 and In Odd We Trust (the first Odd Thomas graphic novel), and to be honest, I wasn’t as exhausted back then. I think that as I get older, my tolerance for stuff like this just goes down. (That said, what is it about the last book in a series that causes me to have to immediately start a new book in the next series?)

Small Shen will be out in December 2012!!

Either way, I’m going on a month long holiday, and will probably take a break, returning in September 2012. During this time, I’ll be reworking this site a bit, by integrating the front page with my tumblr account. WordPress is a good blogging platform, but I feel it just lacks the social component that a microblogging site like Tumblr has – so I’m attempting to change my front page to my Tumblr, while leaving all other aspects of the site as WordPress. How it’s going to work? I don’t know – I hope that the old site wouldn’t have to change too much.

Small Shen: More Art

Posted onJune 2, 2012September 14, 20137 Comments

Hi all! I have finally finished all the pencils for the “Small Shen” book! It’s got 9 chapters in all, plus a prologue, making a total of about 163 illustrated pages, including the chapter covers (which I will be doing in an interesting and very different style for a particular purpose – ha! Not telling you!). The whole book is on track to be finished at the end of July, which will give it a Xmas 2012 release. It’s looking good so far!

Now that I’ll be working on the inks for the last part of the book, I will show you some art from chapters 3-4!