Showing posts with label Entity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Entity. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Bullet in the Brain Pan

This one is a sister piece to Io Pan.  It was created from the same source material, but with a very, very different outcome. Io Pan seems to be moving towards some greater cohesion whereas this piece is about violent dissolution.

On an unrelated, but related note, I recently watched I saw the Devil for the first time.  The movie is dramatically gory, but as I was discussing with my friend Josh, it is gory with a purpose.  You need to feel knee deep in blood by the end of that movie.  I feel as though that kind of aesthetic applies to my pieces like this.  This piece is difficult for me to look at because it should be.  I feel I need to make a counterpoint here.  The movie Hostel and those of a similar make like the SAW series, are simply torture porn to me.  I Saw the Devil is a story about Revenge and all that it entails.  In Hostel, we are watching torture with no other overtures or elements.  In I saw the Devil the director takes you through the horror of the situation to bring you to an ultimate point of tragedy.

I guess I'm justifying a bit here because I was nervous about this piece from the moment I created it.  I'm not afraid of gore and the visceral reaction it evokes from me, but there is a line.  I do not want my pieces to be gory for the sake of aesthetic violence.  I guess my question becomes then...Where is the line?

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

Sunday, January 08, 2012

5x5 Issue Four Cover: The Mask of Fire

This was the image I created for the fourth issue cover of 5x5 fiction.  I had two 5x5 stories accepted to this issue.  Please check out the fourth issue!  I have also had two pieces accepted to issue four!

Recommended Listening:
Vibrasphere
Floating Free (Krama Remix)

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

From the Sketchbook Archives: Face of Darkness

This is from one of my sketchbooks. It was inspired by an image of Randall Flagg from the television miniseries for The Stand. There is a scene where Stu is dreaming of Mother Abigail and Randall Flagg is standing in the corn.  Flagg opens his eyes and they are all red and glowing - VERY Creepy!  I was trying to capture that same feeling that the image from the show gave me - Creepy half light with demon fire within.  Once again I must apologize for the glare.   Heavy sharpie just does not photograph well at all.  :-(

{Sharpie}

UPDATE:

Another update from the Rescans.  This is one that benefits greatly from the rescan.  When photographing the original post, I discovered to my chagrin, that heavy sharpie reflects a flash like polished silver.  No matter what position I placed the image in, I couldn't get a shot without some kind of glare.  Here that issue is completely resolved.  Also, the color on this one is just fantastic.  It looks exactly like the page.  Have I mentioned that I love my scanner?!?

Sunday, December 25, 2011

The Child

"My flashlight battery finally died as I stepped into the darkened alcove, but there was a dense red light emanating from the machinery nearby that allowed me to see. Ozone burned my nostrils. I covered my mouth with a portion of my shirt and stepped over several large cords to get closer to the cylindrical pod within the alcove.

In the halflight, the strange pod glistened as though it were coated with strawberry jam. I brushed my fingers across it. It was warm and thick like the refuse of chicken boiled too long. When I removed my hand, a thin string of it pulled away like snot. I jerked my hand quickly and it splattered somewhere in the darkness.

My touch seemed to activate something with the pod.  It jerked like a water balloon.  When I moved in, I heard a cry like a cat. It was muffled though, as if it were on the other side of a very thick wall.  I leaned in closer.  Through the jelly, something moved.  I gasped when I saw the thing.  It was staring back at me from within the cocoon..."

Recommended Listening:
Empusae
Tenebris For The Unborn
Ritual Decay

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Seasons Greetings

There is a reason that Santa Claus wears red, or maybe this isn't so much Santa as what the Big Bad Wolf did after Granny and Little Red were gone. LOL. Maybe a little of both, but I did draw initially as Santa.

A little bit of tribute here to Mike Mignola to say the least.  His strong chiaroscuro style and his penchant for antique and ancient artistic elements have always been a strong influence on me.  If you haven't read any Hellboy, you are really missing out!

My initial idea behind this piece involved a much more elaborate set up, but as I began working on the piece, simple seemed the way to go. This is a functional christmas card. It is already the correct size for printing on 8.5x11 paper - justify to the right. I couldn't decide on Color or Black and White, so I provided both. Enjoy!

Recommended Listening:
Northaunt
Night Alone
Horizons


{Images created in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop}

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

From the Sketchbook Archives: Red

I did a whole series of sketchbook images playing with Sharpies...dark portraits from the other side.  Perhaps he is a distant cousin from Hellboy's Rasputin or some denizen from the outer dark.

This is another one with reproduction issues.  I couldn’t get a good shot of this one without a blur.  :-(  I gotta get a friggin' scanner!  ARGH!

Recommended Listening:
Apoptose
Asche
Schattenmaedchen

{Sharpie}

UPDATE:

Another of the Rescans.  Obviously, this one is completely changed and revealed by the Rescan.  With the darkness of this piece and the glare from the sharpies, there really was no way to get a decent shot of this one.  Once again the Scanner saves the day!  Thank You beautiful technology...although technically technology caused the problem in the first place.  Ha.  Enjoy.  Interesting note here is that despite the major blur, the color on this one was fairly accurate in the first piece as well.  With the one exception of the glare turning the blacks red...or maybe just picking up the red beneath...hmph.

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Gates of the 14 Aethyr

Empty,
I walk through fog and shade and rain.
A door opens within me, before me,
A space within a space.
I step out of nothing into nothing.
I step through and into myself.
I am the gate through which I pass.

All doors swing open,
a vast passage up down to the bottom top
of every no thing.
The sacred hole in the great hedge,
the womb throat of the Universe,
with a great wind singing through it.

Across this vastness,
across this great wallless infinite,
I convey the burden of space.

Recommended Listening:

{created in Photoshop}

Sunday, December 11, 2011

From the Sketchbook Archives: Scream

Looking back, I think this may be an indirect portrait of someone unpleasant I was working with at the time.  Anger and Sharpies - cheaper than therapy I guess.

Recommended Listening:
The Prodigy
Omen
Invaders Must Die

{Sharpie}

 UPDATE:

Wow.  Initially I didn't there was much change between these two, but looking at them side by side I can a severe blur and glare within the original.  The scan turned all the colors up a notch or two as well.  I cannot say it enough - Hooray for scanner!  Hmmmm...my scanner needs a name...I'll get on that.  :-)

Thursday, December 01, 2011

Not Exactly Krampus...

Not exactly Krampus, but I think devilish enough to fit the season.  Be good for goodness sake, Krampus is coming!

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

UPDATE 010413:

I discovered recently that this piece had some visual issues that I hadn't noticed before.  I've gone through several computer upgrades since this was originally created so I'm chalking it up to the better system I'm using.  Regardless, I noticed the hard black edge within the piece that I had not seen before.  Here is an updated version of how I intended the piece to look.  It's a subtle trade, but I had not intended that hard line in the original.


Wednesday, November 30, 2011

From the Sketchbook Archives: In the Darkness

This is me pushing Sharpies again.  Sadly in the middle of this piece my Teal Sharpie ran out. I had to mix it with yellow and light green.

This one had to be tweaked a bit to get it to show correctly.  I don’t have access to a scanner right now, but I do have a digital camera.  I discovered that the flash reflects quite nicely off of heavy sharpie works.  UGH.  This piece and several others had to be worked over in Photoshop to get them even close to the originals.  When I have access to a scanner again, I will properly re-scan these.

{Sharpie}

UPDATE:  Fresh scan from my new scanner as of 01.28.12.  No glare in the fresh one and no needful Photoshop retouch.  The actual color of the physical piece is somewhere between these two.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

The Throne of the Mind


It gazes within and it gazes without,
It opens and swallows itself.
At the bottom of the ocean, at the bottom of the sea,
The nested flesh gestates.

Intelligence serves it,
Ignorance serves it,
War serves it,
Peace serves it,
Our every action
is the thumping tread of its gargantuan footsteps.
We are it mouths.
We are its eyes.
We are its thoughts.

Drum beats, heart beats,
blood pumps the light beneath skin and hair and sweat.
The dream of a thousand million years.
Knowledge is giving birth to itself.

Recommended Listening:
Phutureprimitive
Cryogenic Dreams
Kinetik


{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

Thursday, October 13, 2011

The Fear

And finally after 3 months of back breaking Rage, from stage left comes the source of all my drama.  Raw skinned and trembling, paralyzed and wide-eyed, My fear takes focus.

I find that I can't be angry now.  There is no resentment and my rage fades like a retreating storm.  I feel sadness for this impoverished part of myself, this portion of me with skin so thin that even the movement of air is like knives.

When I was finished with this piece I found no righteous vindication but instead a strange compassion.  I had thought the resolution of the quest to find the source of my Anger would find a villain to be defeated, but instead I find a victim.  Already defeated, and in that defeat a circling whirlwind of misplaced energy.  A leprous pariah to be given succor, relief, and healing.

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

Thursday, September 29, 2011

General Marrow, Lord of Bones


Within the dream of the abattoir,
beneath hair and toenail and skin,
he digs beneath our fat and past the organs.
His business is with the bone core.

He is the lightning knight of epiphany,
the unyielding harbinger of revelation,
the barrier breaker of the adamant secret,
and the herald of truth too long denied.

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn


You know...as big as he is, sometimes Cthulhu just sneaks up on you. I really had no intention of doing a Cthulhu piece, but there he was, and when Cthulhu shows up, you can't really say, "Well, I don't have time right now."  LOL.  You have to at least see what it is he wants.  I mean hey, It's friggin Cthulhu!

I am a little disappointed in the color.  It seems to have a dropped a bit in intensity from Photoshop to here.  I may need to adjust my monitor.  It was very late at night when I created this piece and my eyes were getting to that liquid rolling down my face point.  I may have to revisit this one in the daylight hours with a good nights rest under my belt.  I'm not sure that is allowed with this kind of piece.  :-P

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

Thursday, September 01, 2011

The House that Fear Built

Anger.  Wrath.  Rage.  I've been trying to create an image that exactly matches my feeling, but halfway through every piece, it changes.  It never stays anger.  In this case, I realize that the anger was built on a foundation of fear and dread.

I think this might be a message to myself.  The Rune Sowelu is mirrored in the piece as indication of damage from a negative solar experience.  Now that the light of the true sun is arriving the fear of that past damage is rising like a ghost pain, inspiring me to retreat from love and light.

In actuality, the true sun would heal the pain, but the previous negative encounter was so great as to cause a powerful panic driven fear of this type of encounter.  So the fear went to ground...underground.  From its seed has grown anger, rage, denial, and despair.

My Anger and Rage are defense mechanisms attempting to protect the part of me that was damaged in the previous incident.  Being only damage control, they were never meant to last and have begun to break down as the expenditure of energy required to maintain them is becoming greater than the energy needed to heal.  The current set of experiences in my life have pushed me further and further out of every comfort zone I have.  All my defense mechanisms are eroding and collapsing out of the necessity of energy conservation. All my issues are springing forth anew.  All my dead are returning to life.

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

Thursday, August 25, 2011

The Burning


This is me trying to sort out my fiery emotions.  Kind of hard when they gang up.  My original intent was to find a release for my emotional intensity.  I was creating this piece at the time the London riots were beginning, but I had no idea they were occurring until 3 days later. 

I'm having a lot of trouble figuring this one out.  I was actually intensely angry when I was working on this piece.  Now it is almost like looking at a firepit after it has been put out.  You remember the warmth and the smoke and maybe you burned your finger or something, but now there is just a black spot and some ashes and the acrid smell that something burned here.

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

Thursday, August 18, 2011

The Heat

Bit of an homage here to another of my favorite artists, Bill Sienkiewicz.  His and Chris Claremont's run on New Mutants is one of my all time favorites.  It was during my formative years as a comic book collector and to say Sienkiewicz's style had an influence on my own would be a vast understatement.

This is either sfter the fire or pre fire.  Maybe both.  It looks as though there has been a fire already, like smouldering embers, but also it seems like a blaze could ignite soon.  My original thought for this was a devilish type character, but as I continued to work on the piece it became something more.  Originally is was just a portrait, but now he is wearing some kind of elaborate head piece.  I think perhaps he may be royalty in some dark dimension.  Or it could simply be that this summer's heat has finally fried my brain completely and I can't see past it.  The heat is all there is.

{Created in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop}

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

EGO

Ah, the pride of ego. It can get us into many a tight spot. There may be more than ego involved here, but my first thought when I was finished was EGO. My original idea headed into it was Rage, but in the middle of that explosive flame, I found this little blue faced guy. A cool center to the radius of flame and destruction.

If I could have fire instead of hair I would. As long as I could turn it off and be invulnerable to its affects. LOL.  I'm sure I would have to buy shirts and hats more often, but you have to admit, it would look cool.  :-)  No such luck there.  Burned my finger yesterday with hot glue gun.  Now I have an ugly alien looking blister on my thumb.  Hooray...and ouch.

{Digital Images manipulated in Photoshop}

Wednesday, August 03, 2011

The Arch Duke Grahtennas


Grahtennas is the daemon of negative expansion. He governs all inflammatory diseases including cancer, eczema, hemorrhoids, genital warts, and cirrhosis of the liver. Hemorrhoids being one of his favorites: as they often become a gateway for a variety of expansive discontents. Alcoholics often fall under the sway of Grahtennas, becoming the berserker foot soldiers of his army with their quick and arbitrary tempers. Grahtennas governs all disorders of the Liver.

Grahtennas is the governor of making matters worse. He governs all explosive forms of violence from domestic to riot and his presence causes lost tempers, violently fatal misunderstandings, car accidents, and miscarriages. Murphy’s law is merely one of the entrances to his realm. Grahtennas enjoys the slow death of an inflammatory disease equally with death from explosive violence. He particularly relishes religious dogma and intolerance and the power brought to him by such areas of the world as the Middle Eastern countries and the southern United States.

His symbol of office is a huge rusty spiked mace covered in fresh blood, his favorite offering, especially if taken by bludgeoning. Grahtennas is very serious about himself and his goals and laughter is forbidden in his kingdom. Those guilty of this crime are crushed into bloody smears at the foot of his throne. However there is a story of a shaman once banishing him with incessant laughter. He is often found on his throne, drunk from a chaliceful of fresh blood, his immense girth overflowing the edges of his seat.

His vast kingdom ranges from the Plains of Rage, The Rancid Caverns, The Seas of Distemper. His realm is riddled with perpetual volcanoes, explosive rivers of lava, and constant heat lightning storms. However it is characterized by a specific lack of any rain. He continuously patrols his regions in his mobile Castle, a burning Siege. He paints its walls red with the fresh blood of violent religious fanatics, suicide bombers, and murderers.  Grahtennas is ambitious and militant, constantly seeking new ways to expand his region.

He has a violent disdain for pure water. If confronted with pure water he will seek immediately to corrupt it in some fashion. Thus he has become the patron daemon saint of industrial waste, Oil Companies, and muddied emotional scenarios.

Arch Nemesis' : Pan, Jupiter, Posedion, Any Laughing God, Natural water. The Ocean.

{Created in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop}

Thursday, July 21, 2011

From the Archives: Skeleton Study

This was a study for a larger piece involving several other skeletons.  That piece is still in the works, but this study is very pleasant all its own.  That and who can resist a dramatically lit skeleton!

Its when I work on something like this that I realize my deficiencies in human anatomy.  It makes me want to draw more skeletons so that I may learn.  I'll get on that.  :-)

{Pen & Ink, Sharpie}
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