From The Sketchbook Archives: She Hunts at Night

Here is a quick sketch from long ago of a goblin girl.  I imagine her with a singsong style of speech with very jerky body movements.  I suspect she leaves a bloody mess everywhere she goes.

Her feet make me think of baba yaga's hut.

{Graphite}

Featured Creature: Death's Head

Here we have the grim vision of a revenant head emerging from a cloud of darkness.  Shriveled with hate and age, it measures us with its baleful eyes.

The Voidchild

The voidchild is the preeminent development in gentech worker fabrication for the new millennium!  The gentech encoded into the voidchild's DNA matrix will allow complete bureaucratic control of all higher brain functions within the voidchild unit.  No need to worry about distractions from job quotas or insubordinate behavior anymore!

Abraxas and the Revelation

The Abraxas portion of the image set itself up quickly and then surprised me by asking for more space, which is unusual in this kind of piece.  I gave it a few more inches of space and suddenly a fog filled hallway became a great grey chasm.

From the Sketchbook Archives: Nightboy

A quick sketch portrait of a nighttime denizen from some time ago. This piece illustrates the reluctance I have sometimes to completely embrace solid black shadows.  It probably would have worked just as well without the hatching or the thin highlights on the neck and at the temple and hair.  Once the black is applied though, it's permanent.  The challenge as always is knowing when.

{Sharpie}

UPDATE 022614:

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

Featured Creature: Devil's Head

Another horned headed monster this week for the second installment of Featured Creature, but a few more steps towards a darker demonic tone.  Somewhere between a satyr and a werewolf I think.  Once again, the background tone was added in photoshop post scanning to give give the image a little more punch.


{Sharpie and Uni-ball Vision Elite Pen, tone added in Adobe Photoshop}

The Room that Ate the World

I thought I had no story to tell about this piece, no insight, but my initial reaction to this piece seems a plausible narrative.  I saw a room containing several people, all altered, in this opulent space.  One of the participants within the space has an insight that transforms their consciousness and those around them.  Their mind literally is blown by the change in point of view.  Visually it makes me think of las vegas a little.  Perhaps it is a religious ceremony.  There was also a flash of a court room.  Of course the room that ate the world would be a mystery.

Archaeology of the Light

Surface niceties reveal hidden demons.  Dig deep, double check your sources, learn the smell of a lie.  On a personal level, this reflects my inability to conceal my rage despite many and varied efforts.  Blood always shows through, whether its your own or someone else's.

From The Sketchbook Archives: Blue Boy in the Underworld

For some reason, still not sure exactly as to why, I never filled in the background on this sketch.  When I found this in my notebooks, I didn't want to mar the original with a bland fill-in that wasn't necessarily in line with what I was feeling when I originally drew the piece.  Instead, I played a bit in photoshop and added a background. 

{Sharpie with background added in Adobe Photoshop}

Featured Creature: Satyr's Head

I've been feeling lately that I haven't been spending nearly enough time drawing by hand and I've been fearful of losing my drawing chops (as it were).  Beginning this week and hereafter, I will be posting a new sketch of some dark creature or other.  Satyrs, Ghosts, Zombies, Demons, you name it.  They will all be crawling out of the recesses of my mind to haunt and frighten. All will be hand drawn with pencil, pen, and sharpie.  By the end of it all I hope to post a veritable army of monsters.  Welcome to my first Featured Creature!

He Came to Me

It is only my fear
that keeps me from my happiness.
I have survived many things
and it is the tide of this history
that will carry me into his arms.

Disturbance at the Gate

Things never stay dead.

Just when you think you've buried all the corpses of your issues and marked all the tombstones, you turn to find gnarled decaying fingers breaking the soil.  Sometimes it feels like it would just be easier to let the bastards eat me instead of fighting them back into the dirt again and again.  After rebirth fifteen I really stop seeing the point.

From The Sketchbook Archives: The Gate

This was a sketch done the same time as He Who Bears the Fury.  This became a finished painting as well.  After a botched attempt at changing the main colors of the painting, in frustration I painted over the entire piece.  This sketch is all that remains.