Cover art for the Door to Unger

Just as with the Box of Whispers, I’ve been working on new cover art for the electronic edition of Door to Unger.

Here’s the black-and-white version of the artwork:

As you can see, I decided to make some changes to the Unger claws for the final colour, version:

On the original cover for the book, Trooogul the Unger is a central figure. I have always been very fond of that cover, but for this new series I wanted to make Kendra the clear focal point, which means replacing the threatening element of Trooogul with the claws. I hope this does the trick.

The next step is to drop this artwork into the design layout. Stay tuned!

Advertisement

Same old story – Part 3

I finally finished working on the design for the new cover for Kendra Kandlestar and the Box of Whispers. It’s my plan to use this cover for the electronic editions of the book.

Who knows? I may also use this for a future print edition. But for now I just plan to use it for the ebooks.

You can see how this cover came to be by viewing stage 1 and stage 2 of my process. I hope you like this final result!

This is why I’m a writer

. . . and not an actor. All the proof you’ll ever need is in the movie that I “starred” in, along with my fellow authors James McCann and Kallie George.

We made this fantastic piece of cinema last year to help celebrate our writing camp based on the theme of time travel—but I finally just obtained the final version (the “director’s cut,” if you will), so thought I would post it. All the credit for special effects, writing, producing, directing goes to my friend Luke Spence Byrd. All the credit for bad acting goes to me!

The dark secret about the Kendra Kandlestar illustrations

 

A vexing villain

I’ve been focusing more on the words than pictures lately for Kendra Kandlestar V, but here is a sketch I’ve produced of one of the scoundrels that will appear in the book. You can see some candidate names for him, but I believe the final name will be Iro Vex.

I have to give credit for this character’s design to my class. They’re a bit Star Wars crazy and decided that there should be a bounty hunter in the world of Kendra Kandlestar. So a bounty hunter they shall have (though you might be a little surprised to find out who this nasty rogue is chasing).

Same old Story – part 2

Earlier this week I shared the sketch and black and white version of the new alternate cover I’m designing for Kendra Kandlestar and the Box of Whispers. Here’s the colourized version of the artwork:

I hope you like it! I coloured it digitally, but tried some new techniques. The next step is to plunk this illustration into a layout format along with the title and byline. Coming soon!

Same old story — but with a new cover

One of my goals for this year is to release The Chronicles of Kendra Kandlestar in electronic format. I had wanted to this last year, but one of the reasons for the delay is that I want to add a few features, plus do some alternate covers.

Here is my sketch for The Box of Whispers cover.

Here is my final black and white rendering of the same illustration.

My next job will be to colourize it and then combine it with the other parts of the cover design. As I complete these stages, I’ll be sure to show you!

A new do for Kendra

For the last few weeks I’ve been devoting lots of time to writing the fifth and final Kendra Kandlestar book. This means getting up early every morning and writing for at least an hour before I do anything else.

Now to answer your questions:

NO, I don’t have a title yet.

NO, I don’t know what colour the cover will be (though I’m grateful that you keep making suggestions; yellow seems to be in the lead).

NO, I’m not finished (I just started!).

What I do know is that Kendra is finally going to have a new hairdo—which means, after four books of drawing her with all seven of her braids that I finally get a chance to do something a bit different!

Here’s a snapshot of my sketchbook showing some of the ideas for how she will look.