Little update

"This girl is under my protection"
Early stages of a pen & ink drawing

Tonight I thought I'd post a teaser of one of the illustrations in my new novel. This drawing is still in its very early stages but most of the outlines are already in. From here, I'll finish the rest of the outlines and start building up detail until I have the contrast and the "color" just right. I say color because really good pen & ink work fools the eye into believing you're seeing as many shades of gray as you would see gradations of tone in a colored piece. So the eye reads the piece as almost having color. 

All of the illustrations in my new book will be black and white (better for Kindle) and will be highly detailed pen & ink drawings. I'm using a very old style as my model (think HJ Ford's wonderful illustrations for Andrew Lang's colored fairy books.) but I'm using it in a kind of retro way. I could say more but I don't want to give away too much, at least not yet. I will tell you that there are no fairies in my book. There are however, monsters, street gangs, horrible villains, frozen taiga, starships, and motorcycles (some that fly). So the style will be retro but the subject matter will not, at least not all the time. When all is said and done, my plan is to present my readers with a beautiful package, a good story and good pictures to go along with it. It's a big project but one that I have every intention of being quite proud of when it's finished. 

I'll end this post by saying that this illustration will be in the first third of the book and that the caption will read, "This girl is under my protection." Hope you enjoyed the sneak peak! Stay tuned for more to come as the book progresses.