I’ve just finished illustrating another book in the same series as My Frog is Faster, in which children decorate sticks to make their own Christmas tree. Knocked this one out just in time for Christmas!
New Children's Book: "My Frog is Faster"
I’ve illustrated a new children’s book, My Frog is Faster, about schoolchildren collecting frogs to have them race! Was a lot of fun drawing many goofy frogs. Here are some sample pages from the book.
New Children's Book: "I Can’t Hear You"
I’ve been commissioned to illustrate a new children’s book. As it’s tailor made for deaf children, all the text is accompanied by hand signs for the letters.
Tamoanchan
More concept art for my book, The Tree of Life! The land of Tamoanchan, with the city of Tulan at the fore, and the sacred tree known as the Yaxche in the distance.
New Bookmark Design
Recently finished writing my fourth book and figured a new book deserves a bookmark. So here are the heroes of The Tree of Life!
Yum Kimil's war generals
I did some designs for two gods who make their debut in The Tree of Life: Ahulane, god of archery, and Chac Chel, goddess of water!
The Realm of Rain
Teelo and Nikte Ha doing some cloud-spotting outside Chaac’s palace in the Realm of Rain.
It feels so good to be bad
I present to you the dastardly villains of The Jade Necklace!
The Death god Yum Kimil upon his throne, with his right-hand man Camazotz, the Bat god, and his left-hand lady, the Dead Queen.
Chapter illustrations for “The Tree of Life”
Illustrations for my next book are well underway! Hoping to have it finished early next year.
School Reader
I collaborated with Cubola Productions to make a few illustrations for a reader to be used in schools in Belize. It features various Belizean artists illustrating its collection of short stories. Here are my contributions!
Rex gamer
Designed this little mascot for Sky Tyrannosaur using Magicavoxel, a 3-D modeller using voxels.
The Art of Seafoam Empress
The game project I’ve been designing art for is entering its final stages of development, so I figured I’d show some of the concept art I made for it.
Seafoam Empress is a hybrid on-land/underwater platformer where you play as Athena, a brave young mermaid who embarks on an adventure of exploration to rescue her kidnapped brother from the hands of Fortis, an evil scientist/deep-sea diver.
It’s been quite a journey working on this, and I look forward to being able to play the finished product!
Some more concept art for my next book!
The Tree of Life, in 8-bit!
I present to you the heroes of The Tree of Life in pixelated splendour (for no other reason than that I really enjoy making pixel art). My favourite is obviously Lord Yaaxu doing what he does best.
Nikte Ha with her father's lightning-axe
This character has undergone a few changes, not only to her name and design, but also her backstory. I wanted a female protagonist who’s very different from Itzel, and I think I’m managing that. Despite her heavenly upbringing (or in large part because of it), Nikte Ha is hotheaded, a little conceited, and just generally rough around the edges, but if she shares anything with Itzel it would be her tenacity.
Location Inspirations
While I’ve been working on a new map for my upcoming book The Tree of Life, I thought it’d be fun to share some of the locations, mostly in my home country of Belize, that inspired many of the places of the Xibalba depicted in The Jade Necklace books.
Some of my fondest memories as a kid was taking trips to the Cayo district, especially to Mountain Pine Ridge to swim in the rivers. And that’s why if I had to choose my favourite part of Xibalba, it’d likely be the Crocodile Mountains of the West.
The Art of Lounging
Bright Macaw: “I don’t think birds are designed for hammocks.”
Quashy: “Just roll with it.”
Kukulkan and Hurakan as humans!
The Creator Twins in their elusive human forms (and looking severe as usual).
Worldbuilding: the Writing Before the Writing
A friend recently asked how I manage to keep track of everything when building a new world as a setting for a story, so I thought I’d share a bit more about my method.
I’ve always enjoyed worldbuilding. For those who don’t know, it’s the rather niche hobby of inventing entirely new worlds from scratch. The most famous worldbuilding enthusiast would undoubtedly be J.R.R. Tolkien, and Middle-earth purportedly grew from his love for creating fictional languages. Throughout my teens I wrote a lot about a fantasy world of my own, drawing up maps of its nation states and going into detail about its history and its unique system of magic. I have years and years worth of notes dedicated to it, far more pages than the story itself, which I didn’t end up finishing—I was clearly so overzealous building the world that I had little time to actually write the story it was intended for!
A map of the world in which that story was set. Maybe someday I’ll return to it—if I’m feeling particularly ambitious.
When it came to The Jade Necklace, while I knew some amount of preparation would be necessary, I didn’t want to make the same mistake. It helped to give myself a deadline—I embarked on the worldbuilding in the first half of 2020 and aimed to start writing the story before the end of that year. Writing began that November.
Now I should point out the rather obvious fact that, in the case of Xibalba, it isn’t a world I invented entirely from the ground up—I have the Maya to thank for that. The Underworld in Mayan mythology, such as the one as depicted in the Popol Vuh, is a vast world not altogether different from ours, complete with its own rivers, trees, mountains, roads, pitz ball courts, and even a whole city run by a council of death lords with a snarky sense of humour. This paints the picture of a (somewhat) civilised society that just happens to be populated by the dead—a sort of inverted mirror image of our land of the living. That being said, it also has nine levels, and the general rule is that the lower you go, the worse it gets, with the lowest being the most similar to the Judeo-Christian hell (i.e. a massive subterranean torture pit), which is ruled by the Underworld’s principal overlord (Ah Puch/Yum Kimil/Kisin, depending on whom you ask). Beyond that, details about Xibalba are quite sparse, but it was enough to at least lay the groundwork for some worldbuilding on my part.
Early on I knew that I wanted my version of Xibalba to be slightly different from this, even though the “Old Xibalba”, as often referred to by characters in the books, is more or less exactly like the one you’d expect—a dark and cold place of misery and suffering. But things have changed since then—the Lord of the Underworld was eventually defeated, but all the gods from the world above now found themselves stuck in the Underworld for the rest of their days anyway, so it stood to reason that they would have done up the place to make it more like their old home. That’s why the “New Xibalba” has its own sun (and at least at one point its own moon), and is a lot greener, warmer, and generally nicer than it used to be.
So when it was time for me to build a world from that, the first thing I did was write up what I call a “world doc”, which was in large part inspired by what in the video game (and software) industry is called a “design doc”. A design doc is basically a breakdown of what kind of game you’re striving to make, and is especially useful if you’re planning to make a game with a more involved setting (consider the richly detailed worlds of Metroid or Zelda as opposed to, say, Pac-Man). It might contain descriptions about the overall setting and its sub-worlds, the character(s) that the player controls and how they interact with the environment, the enemies you’ll encounter and their specific behaviours, and so on. To some who read this, the video game industry might seem like an odd thing to bring up in the context of writing a fantasy book, but ever since the role-playing games of the 1990’s (among my favourites being Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI) up to more recent examples like The Last of Us and its sequel, the line between gaming and storytelling is becoming increasingly blurred. It might also be worth mentioning that my story was originally envisioned as an RPG, to the point that its world doc even includes a section for Itzel’s equipment—which, as it turns out, is quite a useful thing to keep track of throughout the story, as without it I suspect at times I might have even forgotten she was carrying around her trusty snake-stick!
The characters in sprite form.
Itzel’s trusty snake-stick.
And that’s precisely why I find having a world doc an essential part of the worldbuilding process. It can be a struggle to keep all these various details in your head, so it works wonders to have a written guide that you can easily consult and edit as you go along. I hope it helped to make the world of Xibalba feel more immersive (and as a bit of a self-professed worldbuilding nerd, I just couldn’t help myself anyway).
Teaser for The Tree of Life
I’ve been playing with ideas for possible book covers for my upcoming book, The Tree of Life, and featuring its main two protagonists, Teelo and Nikte Ha, who are escorted by Zunun the hummingbird.
It depicts a scene in the book where Nikte Ha, a rain spirit, teaches Teelo how to walk on a staircase of clouds that lead up to the Realm of Rain. Teelo is terrified of heights (as am I) so I can’t say I envy him, though watching the sunset from the cloud-tops must be quite spectacular!