Skin Crawling Comics Countdown: 081413 30 Days

Here's some Skin Crawling Comics zombie preview art from Aaron Hazouri!

From the Archives: Wounded Heart

Here's a quick sketch from an old sketchbook.  I used Sharpie and a ball point on this one.  I think I was at work when I did it.  If cleaned up and redrawn, I think this would make a decent tattoo design.

{Sharpie and ball point pen}

Skin Crawling Comics Countdown: 081313 1 Month

More Skin Crawling Comics preview art here and here from Edmund Dansart!  Yummy!  Check it out!

Featured Creature: The Wound

I'm not completely back on track yet with the Skin Crawling Comics coloring I've been doing for the Serpentine Cure and everything else that's happened since July first.  Regrettably this means the Featured Creature is still on hold for awhile longer.  However, I didn't want to let August pass without getting at least one creature in the mix.  I apologize for the absence of any creepy fiction to go with this piece.  Maybe something will come out later.  I could certainly see this thing showing up in The Devil's Square.

Skin Crawling Comics Countdown: 081213 32 days

Here is some delicious preview art from Edmund Dansart.  Enjoy!

Also - Rachel has asked that we remind everyone that the Indiegogo is a FIXED funding crowd sourcing, much like Kickstarter.  This means that we only get funded if we make our funding goal.  Otherwise we have to try again.

Psyche Delectus: Comes The Yaga

Through fog and mist,
cross the plains of knowing,
in twilight moments,
comes the Yaga.

Skin Crawling Comics Countdown: 081113 33 days

I may have posted this link before, but we're fundraising, so if I haven't I need to.  Check out Fanboy comics for the Skin Crawling Comics Press release!

Skin Crawling Comics Countdown: 081013 34 days

Here's a fresh post about Skin Crawling Comics on Deviant Art from Chrsitine Brunson with some excellent preview art and links!  Check out the goodness!  Also check out the excellent QR Code below that Buried Artist, Chris Thorne created to help everyone get to the Indiegogo page.  Scan, share or click!

Skin Crawling Comics Today: 080913

Until the Indiegogo fundraising deadline I'm going to focus the majority of my posts on Skin Crawling Comics promotion.  I know its a little "one note" but there's an army of creators in this project and I'm happily involved so I REALLY want it to succeed!  I'll be posting about Skin Crawling as often as possible between now and September 13th with links and news to let you know more about the project.

From the Archives: Azazel

Here's a more recent sketch, but this one has a digital twist.  I developed this image while playing in Photoshop and exploring paintbrush options.  I was very pleased with the painterly style that emerged.  There will be more of this style coming and with greater color exploration.

{Created in Adobe Photoshop}

 

Psyche Delectus: Child of Darkness

Born of darkness,
grown in the deeper shadow,
his eyes were always clear in the glint of twilight.
The light, when it came, was not relief,
but only greater pain
on flesh too frail to bear the illumination.
Hailed as thin skinned,
he retreated to the only safety he'd known.

Skin Crawling Comics Update: 080113

Everything this week has been abruptly put on hold.

The heavy continuous rains of the past few weeks have driven local yellowjackets, who nest generally in the ground, into the wall outside my studio.   From there, the pesky critters found their way into my studio through the molding.  I've been moving furniture all week to try and find their entry point while simultaneously avoiding getting stung.  A challenging week to say the least.  Hopefully, before this time next week I'll be back on track and yellowjacket free.

From The Archives: Devil's Square, Screwworm

Psyche Delectus: His Mother's Ghost

She knits her black cloth by the light of television static.

Skin Crawling Comics Update: 072513

In her recent post, Crossing the Line, Skin Crawling Comics' Editor-in-chief, Rachel Pandich, talked more on the Hoinsky Book controversy at Kickstarter and the direction of  SCC fundraising.  That leads me to this weeks big news: the fundraising issue has been resolved and Indiegogo is now the host for fundraising for the Skin Crawling Comics Anthology!  WAHOO!  Just click here or the Indiegogo logo below to check out the fundraising page. The Indiegogo will run until September 13th, 2013.

From The Archives: Memory

Sketches of a panel sequence from my notebook inspired by a young man I met at the time.  His immense feelings preceded him.  This was to become a layout like some of my other sequential poetry work.

{Ball Point Pen}

Featured Creature Update: Delays

Sorry to be the bearer of delaying news, but any new Featured Creature posts are on hold until I can finish my coloring work on The Serpentine Cure for Skin Crawling Comics.  The coloring process is pretty much full time and I have to give that precedence for the time being.  As soon as that is finished, though, I have several creatures waiting in the wings to creep forward.

On a happy note, comic book coloring is the kind of work that I've been working towards and it may become financially viable for me. It would be a dream come true.  Sorry again for the delay, but hopefully this will allow me to get a bit ahead when the Featured Creatures do return.  :-)  See you soon.

Psyche Delectus: Knights of Valzoth

The bringers of Death,
the armored puppets of Doom,
the Knights of Valzoth are never slain.
They only slumber until called upon
to rise once more from their coffin stables
and raise their blood soaked hands
in mechanical fealty to their dark master.

Psyche Delectus: Kali

Though she goes by many names,
the devouring mother
is always recognizable.

Preview: Jimmy's End

Skin Crawling Comics Update: 071813

Between world events, several personal challenges, group ethical and moral clashes, and one of the most intense astrological summer's on record, I feel like I was shoved underwater at the beginning of June and am only just beginning to surface.  With the record nonstop rains we've had for the past three weeks, underwater isn't far from the truth.

Slowly but surely the pages for the Serpentine Cure move forward.  The process for full color imagery is a bit more involved than what I've done before now. I'm in the process of whittling down the rough edges on this very steep learning curve. I'm picking up speed, but only very slowly.

I've finally got all the pages for the story 'flatted'.  Flatting is the process of putting in all the flat base coloring for a comic book page.  Once I got knee deep in flatting The Serpentine Cure, I realized why colorists pay other colorists to do it for them.  It is extremely exacting and time consuming.  Flatting has been the biggest time consumer in this whole process so far.  Like I said, a steep learning curve.

The Serpentine Cure

Tatiana Christian - Writer
Jenay Gordon - Artist
Rachel Pandich - Editor
Gerald Rathkolb - Editor

In the meantime, here's the color version of the Skin Crawling Comics cover.  I don't know if this is the final version, but very cool regardless. I hope you enjoy!

 Skin Crawling Comics on the web

Press Release ~ Interview ~ Facebook ~ Podcast ~ #SkinCrawingComics

Cover ~ Cover in Color

From The Archives: Struggle

Some older sketches for a panel sequence.  I was never sure if this were a comic book or some bit of animation.  I may still use it somewhere, but in a different form.

 
{Ball Point Pen}

From The Archives: Floating

This sketch is an earlier exploration of the same idea I used in a later piece.   This piece is also in the same arena as The Old Blue Man from the Interior Life set over at Trail of Breadcrumbs.

{Graphite}


UPDATE 060614:

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

Psyche Delecus: Lilitu and Pazuzu

In the desert night,
armies are gathered
and a bargain is struck.

Psyche Delectus: Time Management and Other Sundries.

Recent developments have eaten much of my time and I feel as though I've lost a good bit of quality on what I've been posting here at Zombie Bites.  Also with the time and focus required to complete the coloring I've been working on for Skin Crawling Comics,  I just don't have as much time across the board. I've been losing too much sleep and my creative wheels have pretty much locked in place.  Something had to give. 

With this post and for the foreseeable future, I will only be posting my abstract work for the Psyche Delectus Tenebrarum once a week.  It is possible that I may return to more frequent posting in the future, but for now I need to cut back to avoid burning out.  I'm hoping that as one door closes another opens and that the work I'm doing for Skin Crawling will blossom into more assignments and a new chapter in my art life.  Time will tell.  Regardless, many thanks for reading and viewing.

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.

Featured Creature Summer Vacation

Sorry for the delay This week.  I've been dealing with some health issues this past month that have challenged my ability to focus.  I am also working hard on coloring a second story for Skin Crawling Comics.  Add to that a Mercury retrograde and one of the most astrologically active summers ever and you have a cocktail of complication. 

I've been feeling increasingly exhausted the past few weeks and it has finally caught up with me.  I've decided to take a few weeks off Zombie Bites.  Call it my summer vacation if you like.  I aiming to gear back up around the 23rd, but it may be the 30th before I'm back  on track.  I'll keep you posted, as it were.  Sorry.  Accidental puns.  See how tired I am.  :-P  See you in a couple of weeks.  Stay Scary!

Psyche Delectus: Red Walls

Voices like bear bone wind chant,
breathing in the mist thick aroma of herb and incense.
In the dimly lit tent of prophecies,
future echoes dance as wall cloth ghost shadows.

Psyche Delectus: The Lord of Under

He hails from deeper waters,
his every step the revolution of great wheels.
All your enemies fall before him.

Skin Crawling Comics Update: Controversy and Questions

Wow.  The Mercury retrograde in Cancer  kicking in this month is NOT fooling around.  A controversy has emerged involving a contentious  Kickstarter project and is directly affecting the future of Skin Crawling Comics.  I won't rehash what has already been said more thoroughly and eloquently by other sources, but instead I'll point you towards some relevant links:

The Project:
Above the Game

The Petition:
Do Something

Kickstarter's Apology:
We Were Wrong

The Organization Donated to:
RAINN

Comic Bastards:
Carl Boehm: Skin Crawling Comics Takes A Stand

Fanboy Comics:
Barbara Dillon: The Kickstarter Dilemma: One Creator's Perspective in Light of the Controversy

From the Archives: Earth Man

This is one of my first color explorations into working with Sharpies.  I think there may be some other type of marker involved here also.  This was at the very beginning before I converted to Sharpies only.

{Sharpie}

Featured Creature: The Disc of Abrasax

The Disc of Abrasax originally appeared in a fiction created for a previous Featured Creature post, The Night Thing.  Although unnamed at that time, I knew the disc was important and would appear again.  In the image here we have the disc as it appeared at the end of The Night Thing.  The following story is what happened to the disc and Ricky since we saw them last.

UPDATE: Psyche Delectus Tenebrarum

Just a quick heads up from the Psyche Delectus Tenebrarum.  I've just added more links for posts from December 2012 - January 2013 at the bottom of the thumbnail gallery and more images to the slideshow.  I hope you enjoy!

Psyche Delectus: Within The Jungle

I come to it
in the waking hours,
like a second heartbeat
within the roots of the trees.
Another worldwalker, far and away,
beats the drums of his experience.
In my own shadow hut,
I feel the echoes of his song. 

Psyche Delectus: Dagon

He exists,
in the depths 
we cannot imagine.

Skin Crawling Comics Update 06.20.13: The Serpentine Cure

Things have truly begun to turn around this year.  By no means has my life returned to the comparatively quiet days before 2010, but I'm seeing some light at least.  Having wrapped up my coloring gig for the Buried story within Skin Crawling Comics, Rachel Pandich has offered me another coloring gig.  WAHOO!  I'll be coloring a story called The Serpentine Cure.

I just got the inked pages and have begun my preparation for coloring.  I wish I could say more really, but I don't want to drop any spoilers.  However, as soon as I know more about the books availability I'll post that.  I'll also have to check with my fellow creators and editors to see if I can post some teaser art.  I'll get on that.  In the meantime, here's the creative team:

The Serpentine Cure

Tatiana Christian - Writer
Jenay Gordon - Artist
Rachel Pandich - Editor
Gerald Rathkolb - Editor

Skin Crawling Comics on the web

Press Release ~ Interview ~ Facebook ~ Podcast ~ #SkinCrawingComics

Cover

More Skin Crawling Comics Creators
Carl Boehm
Paul Chapman
Bryant Dillon
Danielle Gransaull
Rachel Pandich
Gerald Rathkolb
Chris Thorne
NJ Valente
Adam Wollet  

From the Archives: Lost Comic Page

This was the first page of a comic book project that got scrapped called He who Dies With The Most Toys.  I was doing the penciling, inking, and  lettering for the entire book.  I think it was just a bit over ambitious for my abilities at the time.

Featured Creature: The Staff of Phyligor

Excerpted from Liam Hofstadter's report for the Department of Extranormal Phenomena (DEP), Superhuman and Supernatural Threats in the New Millennium:

"The Staff of Phyligor is an old world artifact of immense occult power.  Physically, the staff is a simple stang approximately 5.5 to 6 feet tall.  Although the blade and base bulb seem to be made of a silver like metal, the dark material of shaft is unknown.  Those few that have observed the staff in person indicate that the full length of the shaft is inlaid in strange runes of some lustrous black metal.

Psyche Delectus: At The Mountains

In high places
Gravity compels
form out of the very air.
Clouds coagulate against
cold jagged peaks.
Liquid begins its odyssey
back to its source.

UPDATE: Psyche Delectus Tenebrarum

Just a quick heads up from the Psyche Delectus Tenebrarum.  I've added a few more links for past posts at the bottom of the thumbnail gallery and more images to the slideshow.  I'm crunching some ideas for how to display a slideshow of the horizontal pieces and hopefully I'll have those in action soon.  Enjoy!

Psyche Delectus: Interstices of the Temple

 

Above, Around, Abreast,

Beneath, Beside, Beyond,

Preview: World War Z