Pure Randomness

A new book.

Adrian

It’s been a while and so I’m delighted to release a new book (and old manuscript) into the e-book universe. Black Diamonds is a book that I started working on a number of years ago and finally cleaned up to my satisfaction. It’s been brushed and scrubbed and hopefully you enjoy!!

(AMAZON LINK)

Blurb:

Julian Krane has trusted his genius older brother, Devlin, his entire life. But that trust will be tested when their mother is killed by a steel-twisting assassin, the brothers are hunted by a paranoid Emperor, and Devlin comes up with a daring plan of revenge. To succeed, they must infiltrate the Emperor’s deadly school of magic, buried deep in a mountain, steal the secrets of all Four Facets of magic, a crime punishable by death, and turn themselves into something not seen in centuries—Black Diamonds.

Some YouTube sketching fun

Adrian

I’ve had a bit more free time in the last couple of weeks and have been doing some creative stuff, which makes me happy. 🙂 One of the things I’ve been working on is the front cover for my second fantasy novel, Black Diamonds. I thought it would be fun to do a work in progress video for the sketching of it (and hopefully later the coloring in, as a separate video). You can see it here:

Enjoy!

A break in our regularly scheduled content (and my ankle bone)

Adrian

As you can see, life got a bit in the way of my best laid plans. A hockey injury snapped the little bone in my leg and cracked the big one (yes, I went to university for my fancy anatomy language). The toe of the skate jammed in the ice and the body and leg rotated around it. I think I will summarize with: “ouch”.

So my apologies for not meeting my normal frequency of content. I’m also finding it challenging to gather the mental energy to do a lot of writing or art at all. Hopefully that will change as I get healthy again. I’m also in a bit of flux on direction in my writing and art hobbies, flitting back and forth in plans and projects. So a bit of restorative rest and rejuvenation might be in order for more than one reason.

Hope your February went better than mine!

A Swipe Clean of the Chalkboard and a New Start

Adrian

I’m going to start a new novel. Maybe some animation too. I’d like to do a bit more of a mix of art and story on this one, if I can find the time (art is much harder for me to squeeze in that writing, simply due to logistics of needing an art table). But I’d like to make an effort on combining them, even if not in the final product, but rather as a creative spur. But in any event, it’s scary and intriguing to start a new story. So maybe it’s worth trotting out a process mountain again. A writing mountain was one of my very first posts. But now that I think about it, maybe a different mountain would be useful. A mountain of effort to progress down, but with the importance of the first steps being the most important. Inverse effort and outcome. Something like the featured image above.

I’m starting it now, the premise. The idea. I have one. Hopefully it is worth the effort that follows!!!

The making of a cover

Adrian

I’m mucking around with my new animation software and thought I’d stitch together some of the progress paintings for StoneDragon’s cover image into a small movie. Each change of image is a new layer of paint (there are actually more changes, but these are the more significant ones). I originally wanted to put some music with it, but then navigating the intellectual property jungle gave me a headache, so I just plugged in some moody words over top. You can always turn the volume off if you don’t want to hear my mutterings. 🙂

The link is here:  StoneDragon Cover video

Warning: once again, please mute if you don’t want to hear audio.

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Featured image is an old unused cover sketch, just for some eye candy…