The Green Bull (a Wandering Koala tale)

Kinghorn never expected to see a murdered co-worker’s body tied to the blade of a windmill he helped have built. He is even more shocked to learn his best friend is the prime suspect!

The case appears open and shut on the surface—but dark secrets never stay buried. Can Kinghorn deal with the truth behind the man he worships and the cause he?s given everything to support? What price will he pay for his loyalty? And what will it cost the city around him? Can even the intervention of the Wandering Koala solve the riddle of the Green Bull?

The Green Bull is a 17,000-word novella with 20 original illustrations and a new essay.

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Color Illustration: Chained and Doomed

I'm not sure why I felt like drawing a six-armed beast with a blade in each hand ready to slice a chained Wandering Koala, but I did. Chains look really cool, have great texture, and take forever to draw. I really like how there are only two colors on the beast, and yet he looks like he's in full color. I also beat up the Wandering Koala more than usual with cuts, bruises, and torn clothes. Usually he escapes untouched, but that can get boring after a while.

I drew this with a Staedtler 2B pencil, inked it with a brush and sumi ink, and colored it in Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter. I used a more painterly style, because this was a fantasy illustration and fantasy looks best in surreal paints.

Let me know what you think!

The Muses Are NOT Amused

In college I was an English minor. One of the classes I took for it was a creative writing class in which we wrote an essay and a short story. The teacher used a method developed by Nyberg. You start with a turning point, then write about the scene, then turn it from first person to third person, and create a fictional story from it. I wrote a story and thought it was the greatest thing in the world. Then the file went missing.

A few years later, I found it. It wasn't as good as I remembered. So I reworked it and added a fantasy-horror element to it. It's currently on sale as Smashwords in every eBook format for FREE. (I'll probably start charging money for it in a couple of weeks.)

The cover took me quite a while to come up with. I've been wanting to combine brushwork characters with Photoshop created objects and a photograph background. I like it, but I'm not sure if this is the direction I want to go.

What do you think?