The characters from my books that most artistic Shansters choose to focus on when they're creating fan art are Mr Crepsley and Darren Shan, by quite a wide margin. That's no great surprise -- Cirque Du Freak remains my most widely-read book, the entry point to my worlds (and very often the finishing point, for those who read no further) for the vast majority of people who have read a work by me. But I AM surprised by how different artists continue to bring new faces to those two characters, even after twenty years and counting.

Today I'm featuring four drawings of that youngest of Vampire Princes, Darren Shan. They start with a black and white drawing, and get more and more colourful as they progress, until we end with Darren RAINBOW Shan!! :-) I think these four picture very neatly show how a character in a book can be pretty much anything that a reader wishes him to be. Darren Shan has no one TRUE face -- instead he has the millions of faces that YOU, his readers, have dreamt into being. Long may he continue to inspire and evolve!

The first, black and white drawing, is by a fan with the used name of Merci. The second, with the light colours in his face and hair, is by a fan known only to posterity as FP. The third, where Darren has lovely green eyes is by yet another fan known only by their user name, in this case PinkBerryGeek. And the final picture, in which Darren (again with glorious green eyes!) embraces all the colours of the rainbow, is by Sainte-Juste.

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