Exhumed: Searching The Stars

This piece was always about vastness and immensity, so with the color, I tried to push the depth of the space within the piece further.  Also I feel that with the color I was able to give the figure in the foreground a bit more substance and form as opposed to the heavily designed shapes in the black and white version.  I apologize for the lack of darkness or horror here.  Exhumed is about previous posts and as much as I try to keep Zombie Bites completely dark, sometimes the light just slips in.

{11x14,  Ink and white acrylic with color added in Adobe Photoshop}

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}

From the Archives: Graveyard Study

This is a study I did for another piece I was working on.  Sadly the full piece was never finished.  There may still be hope for that one yet, so I won't give anymore details as I want it to be a bit of a surprise if I do pull it off.  Regardless though, I am a bit enamored of this quiet aged graveyard scene.

A brief and tiny hurrah - this is a new record for me:  This post makes 30 posts this year.  This is the greatest number of posts I've done in any given year since I started my blog.  I know it's not much, but I'm looking at it as the beginning of something good.  :-)  My goal is to post a minimum of two posts every week, more if I can manage it.  Time will tell.  I know this is a mediocre achievement, but this is the first year I've taken my blog and truly pushed it.  Thanks for reading so far.  I hope this has all been entertaining.

{Pen & Ink, Sharpie}

From the Archives: The Ocean

Sequential art is so often based in practical reality, the moment to moment action.  I guess it's my fine art background that makes me want to bring something more into that equation...or maybe just a yearning to explore the possibilities of the medium.  

How do you get that medium to explore the emotional ambiguities of poetry?  The sequence becomes almost anti-story in that view, favoring the emotional to the moment focused on action alone.  Much of current comic book storytelling is point to point plot driven... Mike Mignola being an exception to that...P. Craig Russell another.  

Emotions rarely give regard to barriers or limits or even time.  The emotional moment is a collection of triggers and often time is not even a consideration.  The emotional space allows for the entrance of the lyrical, the dreadful, the exquisite.  It takes several steps outside the day to day to give room to the emerging feeling. 

This piece is in the same vein with some of my other strips where I've combined poetry and imagery.  Another more finishied attempt at turning poetry into sequential art is here.  I drew this mostly with a ball point pen and added darker areas with a sharpie. 

{Ballpoint pen and Sharpie!}

UPDATE: Green Ghoul - Black & White

I guess all is not lost after all...I took the original scan of the Green Ghoul from my post earlier this week and ran it through Photoshop a few times to get the color out and then cleaned up the black and white.  Also, as a bonus, while I was in Photoshop I added some grayscale to the Black and White image.  I'm reposting the original color for reference.

I'm still feel the black and white image is stronger on its own.  I feel the dramatic contrast makes the Ghoul jumping much more frightening.  The Grayscale is just okay.  The black and white is my favorite.  As before...it is all about the teeth.  That is the part that is trying to get me.  Teeth by their very nature want to bite.  :-O

{Pen & Ink original scanned and manipulated in Photoshop}

From the Archives: Green Ghoul

A brief homage sketch to Tales from the Crypt style horror.  There is also a quality here that reminds me a bit of the cartoon bunny from The Twilight Zone movie...after its transformation.   I feel like there should be strobing lights or something.  

That scary rabbit gave me that gut wrenching feeling you get from seeing something unnatural and filled with hate.  You just look at it and you know...nothing good can come from this.  Similar to my gut reaction to the spider head from John Carpenter's The Thing.  It pops off and sprouts legs and you are left agape, "That did not just happen! AUUUGH!"  Yeesh.  Always check under and behind furniture!  You never know where toothy evil lurks.

I regret making this piece in color now.  It was initially just a quick black and white sketch and I added the color much later.  I think this may be a lesson for me...if it starts out black and white it needs to stay that way...or if I'm going to colorize, a quick trip to fedex office or scan and photoshop instead of (in this case I feel) messing up the original.  Live and learn!

{Pen and Ink and Sharpie!}

Interior Life from the Archives: The Door

More dark feelings from the inside.  I can't remember the inspiration for this piece. hmmm...Perhaps too much D&D or Marvel Comics.  I really cannot remember.  Ah Age.

It reminds me somewhat of the theme of the mouth of hell in many medieval pieces, but without the demons pouring out...not yet.   Ah, the malice of the inanimate suddenly come to unfriendly life.  EEP!  Or perhaps how the gateway of initiation looks to the initiate.  So strange, because there is only light on the other side.  The darkness and bitey teeth are on this side of the door.  

Of course you never want something larger than you coming at you with its mouth open.  I think perhaps this is why babies cry when surrounded by large groups of adults smiling and opening and closing their mouths.  They think we're going to eat them.  That must be it.  It is the ghost of Jaws come back to haunt yet again.  Steven Spielberg and Peter Benchley - you have a lot to answer for!  Not really - Thanks for the Nightmares!  :-)

It all boils down to a fear of being eaten.  Of nature turning and losing one's place in the food chain to something greater or more powerful, of being eaten by the bigger beast.  It is what makes us fear the the Zombie, the predatory Vampire, the hive-minded Alien, and the savage Werewolf.  This is the face the prey animal fears.  Because if it is this large and this close, the face of the greater beast is the last thing you'll see.

{Pen & Ink}

UPDATE 070914:

This piece was Exhumed and reinvestigated with color in July 2014.  Check out the Exhumed image here.

Interior Life From the Archives: Panther Rattler

And now for something completely different...well not really.  The next few drawings were from the same period as my other Interior Life posts from Trail of Bread Crumbs: Sunrise, The Old Blue Man, and The Well.  However, the ones I'm posting here have a definite darker edge.  Welcome to my dark corners.  (Thank you Garth Marenghi!)

When I created this piece and the ones that will follow, I was trying to find some kind of balance between my commercial goals for my art and my emotional needs for my art.   There has always been a therapeutic aspect to my work as well as it being a descriptive litmus for the current state of my life.  Selling that out completely to commercial control seemed ill advised...that and I'm sure I'll never be able to affordable a proper therapist.  So why throw away a perfectly good tool for self analysis and growth?!?  Instead I tried to blend the two by making my emotional works a little more commercially presentable.  I'm not sure it worked all that well in the end as I am currently unemployed, but what do you do?  LOL.  Ah Life!

My idea here was of turning some of my darker feelings into functional illustrations.  This is me on a bad day...a very bad day.  I think this may have been the lurking demon of the steroid, Prednisone.  I took that hateful drug for 4 months and it took me years to recover from its effects.  I would not recommend it to anyone.  It made me psychotic and when I tried to explain it to my doctor he just looked at me and nodded and smiled.  So I did some research and learned what I needed to do to ween myself off it, then went to a nutritional therapist at the suggestion of my friend Su.

Prednisone is the reason I have very little faith in the medical community.  The answer is always - "yeah but you're alive".  QUALITY of life is also extremely important. I wish for anyone who says something like that to be required to take Prednisone until they've eaten their way to 35 pounds heavier in four months, are punching walls at least once a week, are crying themselves to sleep every night, and are laughing and crying at the same time whenever they have ANY kind of emotion...but YEAH...I was alive.
I was just out my F@%&#&^ mind.

(prying his white knuckled hands from the podium, he steps down from the soap box)  Oops...Sorry about that.  Prednisone was a bad experience for me and my doctor was apathetic about its effects on me.  Anyway - how bout that crazy cave creature I drew!

I was worried at first about posting this text because of the intensity of my feelings concerning Prednisone, but I realized that this text matches the drawing quite nicely.  So it stays. 

{Pen & Ink.}

Solitude

Pen & Ink. Scanned. Greyscale added in Adobe Photoshop.