Halloween Sketch Challenge Day 13

by on October 13, 2014 at 9:29 am
Posted In: Art

Okay I knew I would have to get to this one sooner or later… today my Halloween instructions were to draw a Werewolf (there wolf! Sorry.) I’m coming to dislike these more “traditional monsters” not because they’re too easy (When trying to knock off the daily requirement in under a half hour I like easy!) It’s just a case of trying not to do all of the things that every one does. Since I’ve been watching a lot of the “classics” right now I automatically tried to avoid the furry fanged people that are featured in those movies and conversely I’ve been trying to avoid to avoid the furry, frequently digitigrade humanoids with wolves’ heads that are all the rage in a most of the current versions.

For today’s version I went with a more medieval approach with something that was mostly a wolf but with enough human features that it would have to be really dark to mistake it for a real wolf.

Werewolf

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Halloween Sketch Challenge Day 11

by on October 11, 2014 at 10:09 am
Posted In: Art

Today the little box next to my desk told me I had to draw goblins and I didm’t have the slightest idea what to do. So I scribbled for a half hour and came up with this. The problem is that once you get past all of the D&D stuff and go straight to the folklore what you have is just another flavor of brownie, which while very scary when in a bad mood the average person on the street do not know that. I think I was going for slightly malevolent tricksters messing with someone’s office but after doing Gremlins it feels kind or redundant.

goblins

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Halloween Sketch Challenge Day 10

by on October 10, 2014 at 9:42 am
Posted In: Art

This one I kind of botched.

For me the term Ghoul is interesting in modern parlance it’s kind of merged with modern meaning of  Zombie and for the most that works… But the thing is I’ve read some of the Arabic folktales they come from and in those they seem like some kind of dessert ogre, thin, fast and deadly, kind of a jackal to the ogre’s wolf.

And that was kind of what I was going for in the first sketch giving it kind of a snarling baboon face and even though I wasn’t happy with the picture as a whole it did the trick as far as the parameters of this exercise went….But Then I got a better idea that I just couldn’t let go of. So I ended up with two sketches for the price of one today… even though the price tag feels slightly higher.

Ghoul20141010101

Ghoul2014101002

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Halloween Sketch Challenge Day 9

by on October 9, 2014 at 10:02 am
Posted In: Art

Today’s sketch I had down on the list as Merrow, the irish name for mermaids, which I thought would allow me to circumvent all of the romantic connotations going around, but then I looked them up to refresh my memory and found that they are some of the more benign examples and I was doing them a disservice.

So today’s monster is the mermaid, that’s right Mermaids! If you know your folklore they tempt people into drowning and cause shipwrecks. As for the Disney version…. Ariel may be a sweetheart but the ones in Peter Pan are happy little sociopaths who gleefully plan to drown Wendy!

For me one of the scariest way to present them is to show them resting against the side of a boat. Since you only see the top half you mistake them for a real woman and since you are beguiled by that charming smile you don’t ask the question of why someone would be swimming this far out in the water… or this late at night… of course by the time you realize this you’re close enough for her to grab you and pull you down into the water. This was shown wonderfully in Pirate’s of the Caribbean: on Stranger Tides, and suggested in The Rum Diary, but unfortunately a little too subtle for a single image. Anyway here’s a few of them heading for the boat planning to do that.

mermaids

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Halloween Sketch Challenge Day 8

by on October 8, 2014 at 10:54 am
Posted In: Art

For today’s sketch we have the star of the Ring franchise… Sadako! It occurs to me that along with fitting well into the traditional Japanese Ghost lore (specifically the Onryo) She also fit’s into the much more modern paradigm of urban legends. In fact considering how popular children trapped in wells are in the tabloids I’m surprised I don’t hear more stories about slightly soggy ghosts

Sadako

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