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!

Small Shen: Some Art

Posted onNovember 17, 2011September 30, 201327 Comments

Well, I’ve been crocheting a lot of cool amigurumi toys lately, which I’ll show in the next few weeks, but I also finished pencils for chapter 1 (of 9) of Small Shen, my collaboration with author Kylie Chan. This is a Chinese Fantasy story and is a prequel to her White Tiger series, and people who are familiar with what I like to draw best will probably know that I’m in my element here.

I’m sure you’re all wondering what Small Shen is about, so here are a few sample pages from chapter 1. Some are inked/toned and others are still in pencils, but you can probably get a good idea of how the art will turn out from these samples. Since Small Shen won’t be out (from Harper Collins) until Christmas 2012, I’ll probably show more later on next year.

Amazon.com Widgets

NB. And yes, if you know your Chinese mythology, I can tell you that “Gold” and “Jade” are references to the demi-semi-gods “Golden Boy” and “Jade Girl”. The story’s written by Kylie though, so if you want to know more about how she uses these characters, I suggest you read White Tiger, which is the first actual book in the series.

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