Archive | PermalinkCover for Five's The End

Here is another cover commissioned by Ebb and Folks. Five's The End is a novella by David Leyman that completes the trilogy that begins with Three's Company and continues with Four of a Kind (the second artwork in this post). The style of digital inks and colours (instead of a painterly look) of the cover for all three novellas is an editorial decision.

Keywords: artwork,book_cover,ebb_and_folks

Archive | PermalinkIrfan's Transmogrifying Present

Irfan received a gift over the mail from Ryan Rhodes.

There is a great sketch of Irfan with the octopus plushie at Wan Chor's house in the inner cover! Here's hoping Irfan will never stop dreaming. (Although he has been dreaming of zombie attacks these days...)

It's a Calvin and Hobbes collection - which in my opinion is tied with Bloom County as the best newspaper comic ever.

Irfan says, "Thanks for the book, Uncle Ryan."

Bo shuda.

Keywords: friends,irfan

Archive | PermalinkQuick Run To Kinokuniya

I am in school. Second year plus change. Which means I am eligible for the RM200 book voucher giveaway for university students.

With voucher in hand, the boy and I quickly dropped by Kinokuniya Sunday morning before the overwhelming weekend herd shambled in. Without consciously deciding to purchase only horror books, we ended up with them anyway!

Irfan wanted the Hellboy and The Walking Dead books. I checked out the storylines online before deciding he was old enough for them. I also bought for him Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. I grabbed for myself Charlie Stross' The Atrocity Archives because one day I want to play the Laundry RPG.

You'd think two hundred is a high number and could buy a dozen books, wouldn't you. Sigh.

Well, I suppose four is better than nothing!

Keywords: comics,cthulhu_mythos,family_outings,irfan

Archive | PermalinkCover for The Adepts Book 2: Empath

The sequel to The Adepts Book 1: Furato will soon be released and here's the cover I painted for it. The blog entry about the cover for the first novel can be found here. Without further ado, here's the red-tinged cover painting for The Adepts Book 2: Empath, continuing the star spanning adventures of the powerful Adepts and their guardian Payan warriors. The novel will be on sale at the Amazon Kindle Store very soon.

For a larger view, please check out the cover at DeviantArt.

Keywords: artwork,book_cover,ebb_and_folks

Archive | PermalinkTwo Covers, One Customer

Two cover artwork were commissioned by Ebb & Folks for their Iqliptiq Books science fiction imprint. The first is for a prequel and the other a sequel.

Rhittach: The Beginning

This short story tells the rise of Rhittach, the Payan warrior featured in the novel The Adepts Book 1: Furato, which was previously shown in this blog post.

Four Of A Kind

This is a sequel to Iqliptiq Books' short story Three's Company, also featured here previously in this blog post.

Both books were written by science fiction author David Leyman.

Keywords: artwork,book_cover,ebb_and_folks

Archive | PermalinkBook Review: The Cowboys of Cthulhu

David Bain's The Cowboys of Cthulhu was the first novelette I bought and read on the Calibre ebook reader.

It's a great mashup of weird western and the Cthulhu mythos.

Weird West is a genre of western, where its tales of cowboys and injuns and heading out west is infused with heavy doses of horro and the occult. Other examples of Weird Westerns is the Deadlands RPG and DC Comics' Jonah Hex.

The Cowboys of Cthulhu tells the tale of Gentleman John Brodie the Demon Duelist, Doctor Darius Darke and a host of multi-cultural and strange characters in the guise of a travelling carnival gets embroiled in a hunt for three creatures that kill and eat human brains. However, they discover that they might have bitten off more than they could chew in a box canyon where geometry seems to be non-Eucleidian and darker, more evil creatures may be waiting for them.

The tale is short but solid, and left me wanting more adventures with our heroes. I can see Mr. Bain writing more stories with the characters in a prequel or a sequel story, taking into account the ending of this novelette, and I hope that he does!

Keywords: book_review,cthulhu_mythos,weird_west

Archive | PermalinkCalibre Ebook Reader

I have discovered and installed the free ebook reader and management application named Calibre to read books and stuff!

Apart from reading ebooks, Calibre can also manage your digital book library, search for ebooks in various locations from the Amazon Kindle store to Feedbooks.com and synchonize with a mobile reader such as my smartphone. Seeing that I'm pretty OCD about book cataloguing, I've used Calibre to ensure all the books' metadata, cover image and such are meticulously entered.

Thanks to Feedbooks and Project Gutenberg, I now have quite a lot of books in the queue to be read. Calibre also has a list of DRM-free ebooks on its website here

Below is the ebook management interface screencap. Click on the thumbnails to view larger images.

Here is the interface used to edit the ebooks' metadata, displaying E.E. Doc Smith's Triplanetary. Calibre could search the metadata and cover image online or you could edit the metadata and upload the cover image yourself.

The reader window here is displaying a page from Rudy Rucker's Postsingular, a delightful transhuman romp - to put it mildly. Calibre is able to read a number of ebook formats, including EPUB, MOBI, LIT, RTF, TXT and PDF. I prefer to download EPUB files.

Thanks to its syncing feature, all the books on the desktop version is also duplicated in my smartphone for quick and easy reading if I'm caught needing to stay put away from bookshelves. I love living in the future.

Keywords: computers,linux

Archive | PermalinkRuthermore's First Cover

Ruthermore Heidigens and the Fifth Planet is the first of David Leyman's Ruthermore Heidigens science fiction novellas. It features the most powerful wizard in the known universe, simply because he's the only wizard in the universe. His powers are real, but are they really of a magical source?

Here's the cover for the book I painted recently in watercolour: 

Keywords: artwork,book_cover,ebb_and_folks

Archive | PermalinkCover Process for Hags of Teeb

EBB & Folks sent me another task to complete: The cover for another ebook novella titled The Hags of Teeb.

Here is the step-by-step process involved from the first sketch until the finished cover artwork. The first sketch (seen below) was based on the original black and white cover illustration made by David Leyman. I used the general shape of the Hags and the cauldron in the sketch and put them in a cave.

After the sketch was approved, I decided to create two painted elements which would then be composited digitally. Firstly, I painted the cave background element (below). The centre of the cave where the cauldron sat upon a fire was lighted.

Keywords: artwork,book_cover,ebb_and_folks

Archive | PermalinkCover for Meevo

Meevo is the ebook novella by David Leyman. It is a suitably eerie horror-flavoured science-fiction tale involving an escaped prisoner, the prisoner's hunters and - as we see in the opening scenes - a mutant, in a post-apocalyptic future.

To view the full cover image, click on the thumbnail below.

Meevo is available for purchase on Amazon.com here.

Keywords: artwork,book_cover,ebb_and_folks

Archive | PermalinkCover for Three's Company

Ebb n Folks's latest short story soon to be published on Amazon as a Kindle download is Three's Company. The publisher called for a lined artwork with clean colours on it. So here it is. "Three" in the story title is the catlike lady seen below. But why has she been with the protagonist all these decades?

Watch for it on Amazon.com soon.

Keywords: artwork,book_cover,ebb_and_folks

Archive | PermalinkCover for Crater

Ebb & Folks has again given me the assignment to come up with another cover for one of their books. This time it's the novella Crater by David Leyman, now on sale on Amazon.com as an ebook.

It's a star and time spanning tale of humans versus a ruthless alien civilisation at war. Check it out at the link above to buy and download it.

Keywords: artwork,book_cover,ebb_and_folks