The Pet Dragon Fantasy Novel Arrives on Amazon

By The Illustrator  |  2012/03/30 11:02 Posted in Fantasy, Illustration, Self Publishing, The Pet Dragon  |  Comments (0)

cover and product page for the fantasy novel The Pet Dragon on amazonThe Pet Dragon, the fantasy novel I’ve just written, has turned up on Amazon, and looks nice there on the old familiar Amazon product page. I’m very happy with the green cover, which gives a good feeling of the elves and forests of the novel’s setting.

It’s great to see it there and after exploring a little further, I found there’s a way to enable the ‘look inside’ feature. I simply fill in a few details and send a request email, and, according to the information on the Amazon site, the feature will soon be enabled. I’m a big fan of the ‘look inside’ feature and I’ve already sent the email, and of course I already have a PDF I can upload, so the feature should be available for The Pet Dragon very soon.

The book is an old-school fantasy novel containing the first installment of the story of a young elven maiden who goes from obscurity in the forest to playing a huge role in the destiny of the fantasy world in which she lives. The first stage of her story is her meeting with a freshly hatched dragon, and the friendship they form that will go on to have such a huge influence on the direction of her life, and the lives of those around her.

Jungle Space Pirate

By The Illustrator  |  2012/03/29 00:36 Posted in Extreme Future, Illustration, Role-Playing Games  |  Comments (0)

female space pirate in the jungleI’m working on Illustrations for a new supplement for the Extreme Future sci-fi role-playing game, which I’m thinking of calling Deep Space Encounters. The picture is a space pirate in a jungle on some lonely alien planet in the outer reaches of the galaxy.

I’m thinking that there’s no reason pirates shouldn’t bury their treasure in the extreme future, just as they did in the past. I’m writing that up as an encounter for the game as we speak. Perhaps the players will find a pirate spaceship orbiting an out of the way planet, with the spaceship strangely deserted. The encounter would then revolve around the pirates on the surface of the planet fighting it out over treasure buried in a terrible alien swamp.

The illustration will go with encounter description. The pirate in the illustration might even be the leader of the band of interstellar cutthroats.

The whole book will basically be a bunch of wandering monster tables, but for deep space and with fleshed-out encounters rather than just a bunch of monsters for the players to deal with. Putting the book together is proving a lot of fun and, with a bit of luck, it’ll be finished soon. I’ll upload it to the RPG Drivethru site as soon as it’s ready, so it can be downloaded straight away., along with all the other Extreme Future stuff.

Spiralling Cat Illustration in blue

By The Illustrator  |  2012/03/26 22:29 Posted in Illustration  |  Comments (0)

blue cat imageThis blue cat is a nice looking image and I’ve uploaded it – as I have a load of other stuff – to Society6, for sale.

The blue cat in this illustration is intended to look complex and sophisticated, and although it is speaking in the image, the only words that are coming are spirals.

The cat is a relaxed and urbane creature that obviously lives in the city, and a cosmopolitan city at that.

It even looks a little mysterious and evil. I designed it together with my girlfriend.

Moon Bug lost in the swamp

By The Illustrator  |  2012/03/24 22:31 Posted in Moon Bugs  |  Comments (0)

cartoon of a moon bug in a swampCaz, the queen of the moon bugs, has gotten lost and ended up in a swamp. You might be asking yourself why Caz got lost. It’s because of Illustration Friday. This week’s word on Illustration Friday is swamp – and so I did a quick illustration with a swamp in it.

The Moon Bugs have a much more light hearted look than the usual gritty sci-fi art I do for my role-playing games, and the illustrations can be done a lot quicker, which is exactly what you need when you are creating an illustration for Illustration Friday with only a few hours to put something together.

I did start doing a painting with gimp too, showing a space pirate lost in a swamp on a far off planet, but I soon realized that would take a lot longer than the time available to complete. The space pirate illustration will no doubt make an appearance in a supplement for extreme future, the sci-fi role-playing game.

The Moon Bugs were initially done as characters for a comic strip, but I’m thinking of working on them a bit more to turn them into a children’s book.

monster illustration for sci-fi role-playing game extreme future

By The Illustrator  |  2012/03/18 18:15 Posted in Extreme Future, Illustration, Role-Playing Games  |  Comments (1)

monster illustration for sci-fi rpgI’ve been working on the art for Extreme Future and its supplements. I was looking through the sketches I have on my hard disk, and I found a nice sketch of a sci-fi monster walking down a spaceship corridor. It’s in the tradition of Alien, and those sort of biological construct kind of monster aliens, but this alien – I call it the ‘Scorpiant’ – has cybernetics too.

The idea is that the creature can secrete metal as it grows, and so has a metal skeleton, metal claws, and a metal syringe sticking out the end of its tail that it can use to sting player characters – and NPCs too pf course – rather like a scorpion.

When there are a group of them , they organise themselves like an ant hill, with warriors, a queen, drones etc. But mostly warriors, this being an action and adventure game set in deep space.

I’m writing a new supplement for Extreme Future, which will include table to be rolled on when characters are traveling through deep space. They will be sort of like the wandering monster tables from old D&D, but there will be loads of encounters based around monsters, wrecked spaceships, distress calls coming from strange planets, space pirates and the like.

I think this illustration will make a fine cover, with a bit more work, but it is definitely heading in the right direction. It just needs to be perhaps a bit darker, with even more shadows in the spaceship corridor.

 

The Pet Dragon Fantasy Ebook now available on Drivethrufiction

By The Illustrator  |  2012/03/12 02:20 Posted in Fantasy, Self Publishing, The Pet Dragon  |  Comments (0)

drivrthru fiction, fantasy ebook screenshotDrivethrufiction describe themselves as an outlet for genre books, which means it’s chock full of fantasy, superheores, sci-fi, and other nerdy stuff.

I’ll let the blurb I wrote for the book speak for itself about what this fantasy novel has within to delight, but also frighten, the reader.

The troglodytes below the peaceful kingdoms of the known world are stirring again, hungry to rekindle ancient enmity between human, elf, dwarf, and halfling. If their machinations succeed and war returns, the ancient troglodyte king will be able once more to return to the surface, and start a war of conquest that will change everything. His plans are finally underway, after centuries of preparation, and a chain of events has been set in motion that will unleash a storm of bloodshed across the dwarven mountains, elven forests, human cities, and even the farms of the halflings.

Completely unaware of the terrible plans that are reaching fruition, Willowtide is a young elven girl living in a peaceful elven city among the trees. One day she sees a dark shape in the sky, and driven either by impulse or destiny, she embarks on a journey to save and befriend a dragon, a journey that has huge and unforeseen consequences for her, her friends, and the troglodyte king’s plans for the entire known world.

As you can read it’s a rollicking fantasy yarn. Have fun :-)

A female jedi knight

By The Illustrator  |  2012/03/11 05:51 Posted in Heros in Time, Illustration, Role-Playing Games  |  Comments (0)

female sci-fi warriorI’ve been working with my graphics tablet and GIMP for the last couple of hours, just so I would have something to post for Illustration Friday. Well that’s not quite true, I’m killing two birds, as it were, because if the illustration is good enough, it will end up being the cover for a role-playing game called Heroes in Time.

The female warrior, seen in the painting with her back to the fire on the bridge of a doomed spaceship, is actually just a detail of the finished painting. The picture will also have a barbarian in a cave, representing the other end of time.

In the game, the player characters can choose to play as different types of adventurer from the very beginnings of time, to the very end. So they can be a robot, a magic user, an investigator from modern times, or the most primal of cave people.

It was when I was cropping out a nice thumb to paste on Illustration Friday that I noticed that the female jedi could easily be the subject of her own painting.

I like the urgent and energetic the image has right now, but I’m aware it will need some smoothing out, some detail, and a few more hours of attention before it really reaches a place where it could be called a finished piece of digital painting.

I keep coming back to this image though – attracted by the juxtaposition between brutal cave thug and sophisticate spacewoman – so undoubtedly it will eventually get to that coveted polished state of a completed painting.

The barbarian standing beside our woman from the future looks a bit naked I just noticed. I think the next stage will be to paint him in some clothes :-).

fantasy and sci-fi warriors

 

New Fantasy eBook hits the virtual shelving

By The Illustrator  |  2012/03/10 22:20 Posted in Illustration  |  Comments (0)

ebook download shop screenshoz My fantasy novel is finally finished, and has hit the shelves. Well the virtual shelves at the likes of Smashwords, anyway.

The main character in the book is called Willowtide. As the blurb I wrote for the website tells, she is a young elven girl living in a fantasy world where dragons fly the skies and danger stalks the land. Either impulse or destiny sends her on a journey to save and befriend a dragon, a journey that has huge and unforeseen consequences for her, her friends, and the entire known world.
She is banished from the elven forest, attacked by monsters, befriended by the great and the good, and has to tap her latent magic powers just to survive.

Smashwords do the eBook version of books exclusively, and so the formatting is a little different. The book has to be turned into something a little like a big long river of text, with no page n umbers as different devices people use to view the book will cram a different number of words onto the page.

Getting all the little details right, such as fonts, formats and formatting has taken pretty much my whole day, but it’s worth it to see my work out there.

Next I’ll probably be turning to science fiction, and some nice space opera with spaceships, robots and monsters, unless of course ‘The Pet Dragon’ sells well, and then it’ll be back to the magical worlds of fantasy for more stories of elves, dragons, and even a few humans too.

 

Space Weasle

By The Illustrator  |  2012/03/07 00:37 Posted in Illustration  |  Comments (1)

space weasle with blue furAnd, I’ve just uploaded another phone skin to society6. I had an image I doodled of a space weasel, which I had originally created very, very small indeed. I made it a few years ago in Photoshop, and there was just no way of improving the quality.

So I imported it into Inkscape, and copied the shapes as vectors. I probably wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t wanted to upload it to the art site for possible sale. After creating it as an .svg file in Inkscape I can now resize the file to any size I want.

It’s perhaps a little bare with a white background, so I might add some detail to the image behind the subject. Perhaps a spaceship bridge, or the surface of a strange alien planet.

The planet might benefit from having dinosaurs of course, because there really isn’t any image that wouldn’t benefit from a few dinosaurs in the background, or perhaps this illustration will just languish on my hard drive, like so many others. I’m feeling guilty about not working on my novel after all, and it might be time to try and finally get it finished.

Or I might let it stay just the way it is, an illustration of a cute character, against a simple white background. I’m thinking it might look really nice on a phone skin.

The vector art process is a very useful addition, even to an artist like me who thinks of himself as a painter rather than a graphic designer. It unifies and simplifies an image, and gives it really nice clean look. And with Inkscape, there is much less chance of nasty ol’ pixelation.

Sick Little Bunny phone skin design

By The Illustrator  |  2012/03/06 01:57 Posted in Fantasy, Illustration, Self Publishing, The Pet Dragon  |  Comments (2)

cute character design for phone skinI’ve been adding a few images to the society6 art site over the past few days. I found a few nice images I did a while ago, on an external hard drive I’ve been using for backups. This bunny phone skin design for example is a couple of years old, though I only completed it last year.

One of the fun parts of the whole process – apart from the idea that somebody may one day actually buy an image – is seeing my art on a phone skin or laptop case. It makes it look kind of like it has already been used in making the product, even though of course I’m aware the merchandise is only produced on demand.

I particularly like ‘Sick Little Bunny’ because, despite his messed up teeth, his bilious colour, his big fat belly, and his squint, he’s still kind of cute. I have quite a large selection of these creatures and characters I’ve designed over the years, including space weasels, elephants, robots and aliens, and I’ll probably take a little time each night to upload one or two to society6, and get a kick out of seeing them on a mobile phone skin.

This isn’t detracting from my novel too much either. I managed to write 2,500 words tonight, though the writing kept me up later into the night than I probably intended. I’m getting quite excited about the book, as it gets closer and closer to being completed. I’ll have to think seriously about getting the cover illustration finished, because I’m hoping I may well need it soon.