Featured Creature HZO: Dracula

"I heard one of the children gasp.  I looked up from my candy dish and saw a young boy in a Dracula costume at the end of the walkway.  It looked like  he had fallen or something.  His cape was torn and his pants leg was shredded and he seemed to be favoring one foot as he walked.  

Featured Creature Halloween Zombie Outbreak: Ghost

In honor of the of the darksome holiday of ghouls I am trying an experiment to see if my pen and pad are quick enough.  From now until October 31st, the Thirteen Days of Halloween, I'll be bringing you one zombie trick-or-treater a day.

Frustration

Blocked energy only builds.  Emotions escape the vessel as billowing clouds of steam.  The body melts and transforms under these stresses.  Soon, the changes will be irrevocable.

Featured Creature: The Puppet Rises

More shambling, but this time in the form of a disturbing automaton.  This started out as a figure study for something else and turned into this creepy little slime guy.  Slime always makes everything worse.

From The Archives: 2001 Maze Poster Pieces

Featured Creature: Autumn Winds

With this week's creature, we're taking a brief respite from the Zombie outbreak and paying homage to the Halloween paraphernalia from the early twentieth century.  I've always enjoyed the rustic feel of those old Halloween decorations and cards.  They seem so odd to me.  I am fascinated by the jigsaw logic of putting a Jack-o-lantern head on a ghost body.  Fun stuff!

The Ocean Floor

Necessity breeds a different kind of living when there is only water to breathe.

Recommended Listening:

Nest

Far from Land

from Nest

{Digital Images manipulated in Adobe Photoshop}

Cloak of Transformation

A dancing shamanic red witch evokes the power within her cloak of transformation, equivocating the base nature of things to reveal a greater understanding.  All aspects become suspect in the whirling: arriving or leaving, male or female, matter or energy, human or spirit or animal.

Featured Creature: One-armed Male Zombie

Here's another decaying undead shambling from the darkness. This one used to be male before the change and has more of an appetite now, or perhaps he is just waving to say hi or reaching out for a hug.  I'm not sticking around to find out.

From the Archives: Faces

Here is an unfinished digital piece.  This was my attempt to express a difficult situation several years ago where I attempted to reconnect with an old friend who wasn't as friendly as I remembered.  I never finished this piece and I did not reconnect with the friend.

{Digital Images manipulated in Adobe Photoshop}

Featured Creature: Female Zombie

Ah, Lay's potato chips and zombies:  You can't have just one.  Hot on the heels (so to speak) of the crawler from last week we have a female zombie shambling from the darkness and into light.  The outbreak is underway!

Red Shaman

Skin, peeled away like melting wax,

reveals red raw truth.
We are of the bleeding and the bone.
We are of drumming
in the holy land of drumming.
When all thought is peeled away,
still this red drum beats.

Beyond the Veil of Self

Within the confines of a pin hole
we face our essence unleashed.
Our Skin, peeled away like melting wax,
reveals the raw truth of it:

Featured Creature: Crawling Zombie

This piece focuses on one of things that freaks me about zombies, other than the crawling-around-with-no-legs part.  Unlike many others denizens of horror, zombies can be out in the daylight.  They don't care about day or night, legs or no legs, they are only focused on the 24 hour diner called YOU.  Yeesh!  Watch your ankles.

UPDATE Featured Creature: Satyr's Head

UPDATE 10.03.12:

With all the other Featured Creatures getting a tonal treatment in Photoshop, I felt like the very first post was getting neglected, so I went back to give it a fresh coat of grey effects.  Hope you like!

{Sharpie and Uni-ball Vision Elite Pen with tones added in Adobe Photoshop}

From the Archives: Expulsion

This piece is only a quick sketch of a much deeper thought.  I am fascinated by the act of expulsion in association with high intensity states of being: Illness, Rage, Grief, Love, Lust, Birth, Death.  All these states of being inevitably lead to the body expelling something from some orifice.  I suspect that in my future there is a piece involving vomiting or some other form of expulsion.

Featured Creature: The Return of Jack

Here's a hauntingly familiar face.  I should have known that once I broke out my pens, it wouldn't be long before Jack showed up.  Something about an revenant spirit with a flaming Jack-O-Lantern head and a bat cloak. What's not to love?

Into the Spirit Pot

The spirit pot becomes a doorway deeper into the Underworld of self.  Condensation, manifestation, coagulation, mummification, crystallization: it is the coalescing of the soul, the vortex of becoming. We are pulled into its tiny vacancy, forced by proximity to become all that we truly are.  For better or worse, within the spirit pot our essence is distilled and all impurities are laid bare.

Halloween Re-Release October 25th

I found this nugget on the Halloween Movies Site.  I saw this a few years back on the big screen, can't resist another opportunity to see it again big and scary.  Check Halloween Onscreen for local times and theatres!  See you there!

Engine and Entourage

Having passed through the gates of Halloweenland and following Persephone's Descent deeper into the seasonal Underworld, we are greeted by a flaming visceral engine and its unsettling entourage.

Just in Time for Halloween...

Another blurb here to remind everyone that the t-shirts I recently designed to promote the HBA are still available through Neatoshop and the Horror Blogger Alliance.  If you are interested in purchasing one, the images below link directly to the ordering pages.  I got my HBA t-shirts in the mail a little while back and I've been working hard on this ad to show you how good they look!  I was like a kid at christmas when the package arrived!  Thanks Jeremy!

From The Sketchbook Archives: Sun Discovers Chaos

This piece is mostly about the strange creature in the foreground. This creature shows the influence of P. Craig Russell's art on my creature designs.  The odd shapes in the corner were from a piece of plastic from a roll of over sized copier paper.  I was determined to use it as a shape template, but this was the only time I ever used it.  However, it did help inspire the Cthulhu style monster.

{Graphite}

Featured Creature: The Melting Man or Every Time is the First Time

Here we have a face of sorrow and grief swallowed up by darkness.  I've begun playing with the Featured Creatures in Photoshop immediately after scanning them.  The greyscale tones bring such a depth to the creatures I cannot resist.  I am definitely going to continue this process.  Thanks Vincent!

Halloweenland

The tide turns, the Autumn Equinox passes, and we enter into the season of the Underworld.  Welcome to Halloweenland.

Haunted Asheville Tour on the Autumn Equinox

On the night of the Autumn Equinox, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to go to Asheville, North Carolina and take the Haunted Asheville walking tour with a group of friends.  It was GREAT!  Our tour guide, Tad, was very friendly and shared many interesting and creepy facts about all the sites we visited.  I found out lots of new creepy information I never knew about Asheville.  If your in the area and looking for a good haunted tour, I give this one five stars!

Autumn Equinox: Persephone's Descent

Today is the Autumn Equinox, the temporal and celestial midpoint between the Summer Solstice and the Winter Solstice.  Here in the northern hemisphere, from now and into winter, the days grow shorter and the nights grow longer.  This is the beginning of the dark half of the year.

Visitor

Space folds like draped cloth and light falls into the void created when the visitor arrives.

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!