Author & Artist

And finally, check out my buddy, Ashbane!

I decided to do some fanart of Asbane's book Children of Draelia. I tried to do a shot of Skyscraper Tower, though architecture isn't my strong suit. I based the tower on Wuhan Greenland Center which, like Skyscraper Tower, is near a body of water and has a flat top. I ended up focusing on Shard and the sunset more than the tower. It was fun to try something different.

Got an urge to draw a character that won't show up for a few more books. He also got a slight redesign to keep the angle interesting. But this is Ari and his wings are the largest amongst his friends and family. When I eventually get to his story, his wings will be a factor to his story, but I won't spoil anything for now.

I found some old sketches of dragon beds and decided to whip up a quick drawing to show them off. The types of beds that dragons use varies a little. Richer dragons have four post bed frames with a large mattress and lots of pillows and blankets. Very poor dragons sometimes only have a couple of blankets to call a bed. The other two bed types are the most common. What a dragon uses depends on personal preference. Some like to curl up into a tight ball and prefer the smaller, rounder bed to help hold the ball shape, while others prefer to stretch out and use the rectangular base. Some even change their preferred bed type according to seasons and temperature.

Late in Intertwined, there's a scene where Evelyn takes Alita into the castle's gallery and they see three portraits of the most recent High Calns and their Prinzes. In the actual scene, these are depicted as full body portraits, but here I've only drawn headshots. It does show the passing of time and the crown across decades, as well as a little peak at how emotions can change in the case of Gerold and Griffin between their Prinze portraits and High Caln portraits.

The woes of character design… I actually love drawing my dragons and figuring out designs and colours and having them interact in the world. But sometimes, when drawing a character I've never done before, I really struggle with choosing something. This time, it was Tetra, a newer character who will be showing up in my second book. I knew from my time writing him that he was likely green, though I did test out some other colours. I also wanted to pull from the appearance of tetra fish in his design, hence the bright stripe running down his side. But exact colours? I was stumped. So I put this together to try and figure it out. I'm thinking I'll go with the middle option but all of the bottom row and the middle left colours are cool to me too.

Finally locked down a design for another dragon species relative, the basilisk. They are large snake-like creatures with venom and rattle tails. The fins on their backs and crests on their heads were pulled from the real life lizard called a basilisk, specifically the green basilisk. The fins are movable and larger on males than females. Aside from wyverns and raptors, these are perhaps one of the most terrifying creatures to stumble across.

Korbin simply smiled back at her. Modesty released her grip on his throat and stepped back from the bars. Korbin felt his throat before looking back up at her.

This past week, one of my co-workers left our job for new opportunities. It was a bittersweet time. Our other co-worker and I decided to make a farewell gift for her. I made this drawing of our dragons hugging for it and we got it framed. It went over well and we're all still friends, but we're going to miss working with her.

“Okay. I don’t really know what that means,” Luana said, turning back for the Manor. Markos’s words had confused her more than if she hadn’t asked for his advice in the first place.

“Yeah, I do,” Evelyn said with a smile. She remembered her head spike and her smile fell. “I guess we can’t do that anymore.”

Decided that I wanted to draw Modesty. My original plans for the angle was to be lower down, pointed upward more, but my skills in perspective and foreshortening are lacking. However, I really like what I ended up with.

Due to being unwell this past week, I decided to share an old project I worked on. A few years ago, I made a set of expressions of my dragon, Dawn, in the form of stickers to use in place of some emojis on my phone. I'm particularly fond of the Melting Dawn expression.

After doing so much work to figure out my wyverns, I only needed a few tweaks to do their close cousins, the raptors. An equally dangerous, but not as dangerous species. The little feathers on the sides of their heads cover their ears. I took a fair bit of inspiration from avian dinosaurs and birds while designing them.

Decided I wanted to draw a dragon wing at a weird angle. Of course, I had to draw the rest of the dragon along with it. Not my best work, but I enjoyed trying to get the wing to bend in a way that still looked possible. And, yes, dragons can get injuries in the wing membrane. It's rather thin so rips, tears, and cuts are a normal thing when they're rough with their wings. Most of the time, the injuries are minor and they can fly just fine once they've healed.

I started this piece with the question 'do dragon celebrate Valentine's Day?' In a way, they do. During the middle of spring, they have a festival to celebrate love, life, and youth. It's not just about couples and romance for the dragons. They also celebrate the youngest dragons. Here, one of the adults is helping two fledglings learn and practice flying, something that's often seen at their festivals.

I decided to sit down and put some effort into designing some wyverns. I've known for a long time that my version of wyverns would have bird-like posture and not use their wings to help walk, but I never had a solid design for them. Well, now they look an awful lot like avian dinosaurs and birds! I wasn't sure about this design at first, but it grew on me as I sketched out more and more ideas for how they might live. So here's a small look at the wyverns in this world.