9 Years

Happy Birthday to Zombie Bites!

It has only been nine years since I began posting, but it seems like a lifetime ago.  To commemorate the occasion, I've created this image including a combination of elements from The Moon and The Hermit cards of the major arcana of the Tarot.  I included the Hermit as card nine of the major arcana and the Moon due to its correspondences with the ninth sephirah of the Kabbalah, Yesod.

From the Archives: Dream DiBit

These iridescent scarabs showed up in a couple of dreams I had long ago. They were about 3.5 inches long and about as thick as the width of a teaspoon.  The reproduction I've done here is close but I feel like it needs to be redrawn on black paper or some such.  I created the second image in Photoshop to get a little closer to their actual appearance and color from the dreams.  They seemed to have a black base color with a opalescent metallic sheen to them.

From the Sketchbook Archives: Dream Shard

Images I recorded from a dream / nightmare. I think the image was from a dream but turned quickly into a story upon waking.  In the dream there was a black rectangular cuboid that was very shiny.  At its base was a grotesque substance that looked as though the feeling of illness were given a physical form.  It was olive colored with dark eggplant purple bubbles emerging from it. It had integrated itself into a building and was sticking out of a brick wall.

The Room

We live within a lie.

From the Archives: Portfolio 2001 Front Cover

In 2001, I took all of my current artwork and created my portfolio for the year.  Sadly, this and most of the digital pieces from that portfolio were lost to the Hunger of the Zip Disks.  I finally figured out that the zip disk scramble must have happened around the last quarter of 2001 or at some time in 2002 because I made this portfolio to show at Dragoncon in August of 2001. 

I was very lucky recently to discover I still had a physical copy of this portfolio.  I was able to scan several images from it.  After scanning, I had to touch it up a bit due to dust and scratches, but the most of the image integrity is still intact.  It is a bit dark, but so was the original Photoshop file.  Those are my hands in the background.  If I remember correctly, everything else was created in Photoshop.  The Moon image/card in the center is from my business card at the time, but here it is inverted from its original values.  I wanted to create an artificial space that would give a feeling of Mystery and Magick in its artificiality.  I hoped to add to that by confronting the viewer with something that is at first glance seems mostly normal, but upon closer inspection is challenging to understand. 

There is always such a strange relationship between my business cards and my portfolios.  They trade off themes very readily and sometimes dominate each other.  My two favorite portfolios so far have taken their themes from my preexisting business cards.   This portfolio and my current one both followed themes that I had used on the business cards prior to making the portfolio.  I don't currently have a copy of my business card from this time frame but I will find it and post.  :-)  My current card is here.

{Digital Images manipulated in Photoshop}

The Cube

This thing appeared in a dream one night
It was used to make a duplicate of someone's memory in case they died.
It could also steal memories in an offensive fashion.
I don't think it was sentient,
it seemed to be more of a tool.

{Digital Images manipulated in Adobe Photoshop.}

The Monoliths

I had a dream of a place like this. In the dream it was underground. 

 {Prismacolor and ink}