Champion Fan Art

The countdown for Curse of Magic continues! Only a few short days and it will be in your hands–and I cannot wait to hear what you all think of it! It’s so fun to share the Timeless Fairy Tale world with you all!

Keeping that in mind, I am so happy when readers like my characters enough to dedicate time to recreating them through drawing, painting, design or even costumes! 🙂 So I thought today we could celebrate with a post dedicated to the most recent pieces I’ve received.

If you have fan art you’d like to send to me you can always email it to me at kmshea@ kmshea.com (Remove the space in the email–I put it in there to throw off spam bots!)

Timeless Fairy Tale Series flag by Ashleigh

I’m starting with this piece by Ashleigh because no one has ever made a flag to represent the Timeless Fairy Tales series before! 🙂 She packed a lot of symbolism into it so I’m going to share how she described it to me:

I imagine the background would be made of the iridescent color changing  material as Angelique’s dress, twelve hearts total around the edge:

1   Elle and Severin

2   Elise and her brothers

3   Cinderella and Friedrich

4   Gemma and Rumpelstiltskin

5   Dylan and Callan

6   Gabrielle and Puss

7   Odette and Alexsei

8   Briar and Isaia

9   Ariane and Lucien

10 Quinn and Emerys

11 Snow White and Fritz

12 *cough* Angelique and Everiste *cough*

The has sharp, bladed star in honor Angelique’s magic with Pegasus over top, because he is her constant companion.

I can tell she put a lot of effort into it, and all the thoughtfulness behind the symbolism is amazing! Thanks, Ashleigh!

Angelique by Caitlyn

Here’s an artwork from Caitlyn that shows Angelique in her color changing dress! Angelique is described in this dress for most of the Timeless Fairy Tales series so it was fun to see it come to life in this drawing, and I’m really impressed with the way she Caitlyn colored it! (Seems to me like it would be an artist’s nightmare, but it looks so awesome!

Aas a side note, you found out how Angelique receives this dress in Book 1 of Angelique’s series, and in Book 2 you’ll see how she first starts wearing it!

Angelique by Rhapsody

Here’s another image of Angelique by Rhapsody, and this is how Rhapsody pictures she would look destroying “the mirror”. She actually used glitter in this artwork which sadly doesn’t come through very well in the photo 🙁 but I love that she used glitter to make this already beautiful image even more powerful! I also love how beautiful and bad@$$ she made Angelique, it’s so gorgeous–and the intricacies on her dress–my goodness!!

Angel by HobbityLady97

There are several pieces from HobbitLady97 already in the Fan Art Gallery and here we have another one, this time featuring Angel as described in the book Snow White. The silver eyes are perfect, and the hair length is exactly what I was picturing as well! 😀

Tari’s Practice Uniform by 4FANTASY

Yvrea by 4FANTASY

Band Gallant by 4FANTASY

I received 3 different pieces from 4FANTASY, the first two are made using the Azaleas Dolls website and feature Yvrea and Tari from the Elves of Lessa series. And the last image is a drawing she did of Band Gallant from the Twelves Dancing Princesses story. I’m so happy she did the Band Gallant artwork as this is my first artwork featuring any of them (other than Quinn)! The secondary characters don’t tend to get drawn as much as the main characters, which is understandable, but this group has a special place in my heart so I’m happy she captured them (and their personalities) on paper. Seriously, though, this is a perfect embodiment of their personalities. Guy, Leigh, and Kenneth made me laugh so, so, so hard at their very accurate portrayal, and I love their uniforms as well! Thanks 4FANTASY!

I’m going to close off this post with another big round of thank yous and applause to the amazing artists featured today! You are so talented, and while I’m delighted to see my characters brought to life, I’m also so proud of your mad skillz! 😉 To all of my Champions, thanks for reading! (And prepare to watch Angelique toil!)

Champion Photos

While Emerys is still gloating over his second-place win, I thought it would be the perfect time to show off the work of an amazingly talented Champion, Marina! She sifted through Twelve Dancing Princesses and created an incredibly accurate Quinn outfit!

Marina (Instagram Dancefully) has the belt quiver, the bow, the arm guards, the hair, the clothes–she really nailed our girl Quinn! (Marina is actually wearing a wig she braided–I knew that when she sent me the photos because she asked about hair color, and I was STILL thought it was her real hair when I first saw the shots!)

Also mad props to her for running around a forest. That is not as easy as it looks–I’ve done a lot of unusual things for the sake of testing out scenes in real life (ie: running in a dress in snow, timing myself to see how long I can carry a good-sized male cat, etc) and running in a forest is near the top of my list of things that are no fun because of the frequency in which you get a branch in the face. Though it looks like Marina has Quinn’s athleticism so I bet she fared a lot better than me! 😉

My favorite photo though, is the one below, as it has Emerys in it. 😉

SO COOL!!

While Marina made the costume and really brought Quinn’s character to life, the crazy talented photographer is Natisha of Guardian Memories Studios (Facebook link or Instagram Link). Natisha also used her photoshop magic to add in our boy Emerys!

Marina is working on Rakel from The Snow Queen books next, and I can’t wait to see how she pulls it off! 😀

What do you think, Champions? And have you ever dressed up as a book/movie character? (For fun, Halloween, a convention, etc?)

2018 Reflection

I’m interrupting the Snow White themed blog posts to bring in my annual year-in-review post! (I thought it was fitting since it is the last day of 2018.) In this post I’ll go over some of the things I did this year (as a writer) and a few of the things I’ve learned. Let’s get started!

This year I tried a lot of new things!

I was a part of the Entwined Tales series with some of my best author pals and I went to my first writing conference in Chicago. (2019 is already sold out, but it was the Sell More Books Show Summit for those of you who are curious.)

I did a bunch more events this year (like the Atypical heroine event with Lindsay Buroker, and my gingerbread house building session on Facebook Live) and have also had a BLAST with the A. M. Sohma crew who have been able to play Lord of the Rings Online with me! 🙂

Since I had both the amazing Rock-Star-Assistant-Meg and Myrrhlynn (my cover designer who has been stepping in as a temporary assistant for this year) helping me out, as a team we decided to host the Summer Reading Event and we also held a Christmas event/celebration as well–which included my very first International Giveaway!

Myrrhlynn helped me launch a Merch store with some seriously cute T-shirts, mugs, stickers, ect, and she helped get the K. M. Shea/A. M. Sohma Discord Channel off the ground, too! She also got me on Pinterest, and she is responsible for all the beautiful quote images you see on my account as well!

Besides all the new things, we still kept up some great fun from previous years!

For starters, in a very surprising twist, Merlin of King Arthurs and Her Knights took first place in the 2018 Hero Poll, shoving Stil of Rumpelstiltskin out of first place for the first time since the poll started! (You can bet he wasn’t happy about that!)

The fanart gallery has exploded with amazing and beautiful contributions from some crazy talented Champions! (Thank you!) And I also got some surprising results from the 2018 Reader Survey which will help me adjust for future events, ect, so a big thank you to everyone who filled it out!

In 2018 I also brought up a ghost from the past, so to speak, by publishing Royal Magic–book 2 of the Elves of Lessa series. It is a suuuuuper old series given that I published Red Rope of Fate in 2013, but I was thrilled with how excited you Champions were about it, so thank you for your support!

Which leads me into the second segment of this post, what I’ve learned…

I learned that while you Champions find things like the Summer Reading Event really fun, two months is perhaps a little too much fun. (Hence why the Christmas event was just a few weeks.)

As a writer I also learned that I need to perhaps be a bit more mindful of how difficult a project is going to be when I begin it. Both The Second Age of Retha and Timeless Fairy Tales have become…bigger than I first expected.

Second Age of Retha has become bigger just because the scope of the battle they are marching into requires A LOT more characters to balance, something I hadn’t quite thought through when I got started. Timeless Fairy Tales, on the other hand, is just huuuuge, and making sure all the threads connect can be taxing considering all the books in the series. (In example, in order to check one fact for Angelique’s first book, I had seven different book files open.)

Neither of these things are inherently bad, it just puts me through the wringer and is a little more challenging to write unlike my fluffier stuff, like Royal Magic. If I want to make it through this in a healthy manner, I need to be more aware of this so I don’t accidentally burn myself out.

In 2018 I continued the struggle of trying to get better at writing romance. I found a few helpful resources so hopefully I am slowly getting better, but it’s honestly a bit hard to judge. (Sometimes I just feel like I can make certain couples click better/more easily, ahahah.)

And I think that just about wraps it all up! 2018 was a really great year–thanks for joining me in this journey! But what about you, Champions! Was there any words of wisdom you learned in 2018 that you’d like to share?