People say you never really notice the passage of time, and it’s true, in fact at times it does feel like only yesterday I was doing this…

Obviously it wasn’t, developing ichthyophobia means I no longer feel the desire to play with a net in the river, and the jumper no longer fits (which I don’t consider a problem).  Time has passed since that day playing in the river. My hair is no longer blonde, in fact it’s no longer there, and I’m far from being ‘cute’

So why was I sitting in a classroom thinking someone was old? Well, they used to read out notices at the start of each school day, normally it was things like please stop trying to throw your classmates out of the windows. One day however the notice was a bit different, the teacher announced with a smirk that another teacher was celebrating their 40th birthday. Which is of course why I had the “…he’s old!” thought.

My perception of ‘old’ has changed over the years, and now being two days away from my own 40th birthday it’s obviously the age of someone in their prime and certainly not an age that could be considered old There are still too many items on the to do list for me to be feeling the 40 years (or 350610 hours*) I’ve been around to date.

In other news…

I’m currently working on an update to this website to incorporate my gallery and a weekly challenge to upload something new every week

*If I’ve slept on average 6 hours every night this means in the past 40 years I have slept for 3652 days – what a waste, I could have been doing something!

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Fido says no, we don’t…

Anyway, I did take a couple of ’stone’ photographs

and this one I’ve named forkintree…

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Like many people these days when faced with an author for the first time you head straight to Google and tap in the name, I did this with Alexey Pehov and was shocked when it returned just 33,700 results. This is something that will soon change, Shadow Prowler is going to make Alexey one of the names in fantasy literature; he is of course well known in Russia where his books have quickly become not only award winning but best sellers.
Perhaps I’m getting a little ahead of myself, I should start this review at the very beginning. Shadow Prowler has a real fantasy cover, the modern trend of a more graphical approach to book covers is perhaps a clever one to some people, to me it has always been a disappointment, I like the cover to draw me in. Whilst I still agree that we should not judge a book by it’s cover I find a good  illustration goes hand in hand with a good fantasy or science fiction book. The content of the book is of course the most important part, and with Shadow Prowler it was the part I was really unsure about at first. Perhaps I should clarify this a little… whenever I see a publisher get really enthusiastic about a book I start to wonder if they have in fact discovered they are about to publish a lemon and need to create some hype to get the sales figures up (maybe I need to see someone about my cynicism). So, when I started to read Shadow Prowler it was with a certain degree of dread that I was going to be either asleep by the end of page two or doodling in the margins; my sense of dread was misplaced, Alexey has a style of writing which draws you in and makes you want to keep reading.
Some of the fantasy you read these days falls into one of two groups – either the plot is well defined and the characters are flat and without dimension, or the plot is terrible and the characters are great. Alexey has however managed to create good characters and a well defined exciting plot, the character of Shadow Harold legendary master thief of Avendoom at first made me think of Feist’s Midkemia but these thoughts quickly passed as the story drew me further and further in. There is no long drawn out scene development taking up most of the first chapter, Alexey drops you right into the action and you see the streets of Avendoom through the eyes of Shadow Harold. Within the pages of Shadow Prowler you’ll meet ogres, giants, elves, but certainly not as you’ve met them before. You could say the elves of Alexey are a refreshing change from those most fantasy readers are familiar with, which is one of the (many) good things about this book, he does not stick to the stereotypical elf or warrior lead characters but explores the fantasy genre in a new exciting way. Now I can see why Simon & Schuster were so excited about publishing this book, as it’s going to be a book that most fantasy readers will want to read and explore. I can imagine in a few weeks time the internet will be awash with talk about Shadow Prowler, and eager readers wondering when the next book in the trilogy will hit the shelves.
In short, if you like reading fantasy, you’ll love reading this book it’s out in the UK on the 1st of April 2010.

Shadow Prowler (Chronicles of Siala 1)

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This has to be one of my favourite trees…

Then there was the view over to the snow covered fells….

I need to get on the tops one of these days soon and take the view looking down rather than looking up

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As the theme I was painting for was cloud orientated the clouds needed to be prominent, sadly my first clouds looked a lot like a load of blobs and held no resemblance to any clouds I’ve ever seen.

My solution was to paint another sky and photoshop it into place, not something I am prone to doing but it saved me painting the whole piece again.

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Okay, the decision was not that hard to make, my mind has been lost in Middle Earth for a few days and so the Lonely Mountain was a fairly obvious choice. The sketch was just supposed to be a rough outline for me to work from in paint, but I was enjoying the sketch process too much that I had to fill the sheet (if you’ve not tried the Derwent Pencils Onyx range you should, they make sketching so easy). Now that I’ve started with this one image of the Lonely Mountain I really want to try it in paint, maybe later.

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Anyway, not having time to complete a serious study of clouds, I scribbled something a bit quicker, first of all I completed the pen & ink version…

I then thought to myself, hmmm perhaps I should colour this pen & ink piece…..

I was nearly finished tinting the piece in Photoshop when Julie pointed out I’d spent around three times longer in Photoshop than I did with the pen & ink Now I need to do something a bit more serious.

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