I don’t think this is the best of the lot so far. A combination of being busy most of the day and not knowing just what a nightmare would look like. I think my main inspirations were somewhere between the spectral horses from the Xanth books and the Henry Fuseli painting. Either way it feels like another rushed mess.
I’m not sure if I really should have included Gremlins in the list. Not counting the movie and the Twilight Zone Episode they don’t feel particularly Halloweeny… (though I’m sure a pilot would disagree with me.) But on the other hand I find them interesting since they are one of the few examples of modern fairy lore. How much of that is fun tall tails or actual superstition I do not know… I’d be very interested to know how much they exist in current folklore in a “I don’t believe in them, but…” kind of way.
The downside of this challenge is that it’s the third day and already tired of drawing the cliche’s! (Next year I’ll plan ahead more and make a point of not putting them on the list) So as you can guess today I reached into the hat and drew one of the top five monsters that everyone thinks of come Halloween time… Frankenstein’s Monster.
The point of this exercise is to keep things under thirty minutes while forcing you to think on your toes (“I don’t care what your muse said, this is your assignment”) the random draw takes away the ability to plan ahead (I started the day with what to do with the chupacabra) so I was not ready to do anything beyond something based on Boris Karloff in Jack Pierce’s makeup!
I quickly rejected something with the monster on the slab, it took me a little longer to decide something a little longer to decide something jokey involving the monster volunteering for the school of the blind was not a good idea.
Finally I decided to go with my favorite scene in the novel where the Monster confronts Frankenstein in the mountains. For me this is what tore me away from all of the movie cliches I grew up with where the monster turned from a shambling creature and became a flawed and broken god.
For today’s Halloween Sketch I drew… (I’m finding myself catching myself on the double meaning of this word this week. “I drew the card from the hat and then I drew what it told me to draw”) Ahem… I drew (and then drew, sorry!) Jiangshi (??) aka Chinese hopping vampires, or zombies.
Too me they generally come off more as zombies since in every movie I’ve seen them in they are being controlled by some sort of necromancer. When you first hear the word “hop” they sound extremely silly but in the right context, even in the incredibly silly Mr. Vampire, they’re as creepy as hell.
To make this month interesting I decided to do one of those sketch a day challenges and since this is the season I decided go with the Halloween theme. Anyway I spent a bit of time getting ready for it writing a list of every monster I could think of (which was depressingly few and) and put them all into a jar so I could draw one at random.
Regrettably today I drew vampire.
It’s not that I hate vampires it’s just that they’re so damn cliche and I certainly didn’t want to start the month drawing Dracula, Lestat or $%#@ing sparkly Edward! So because of this It took me a while to get the layout right. I went in wanting to have the vampire pulling up on the woman in a taxi cab and then realized I had gotten the angle wrong and besides it was on the wrong side of the road for the drivers side of the car to be visible. But despite all that I think this was a pretty good start… even though I made her head too big.
