Inktober Day 18 – The Mask of the Red Death

by on October 18, 2016 at 9:45 am
Posted In: Art

Inktober Day Eighteen The Mask of the Red DeathWow it’s day’s like this I regret not smoking because after pictures like this one I feel like I need a cigarette!

So today I got to do Edgar Allen Poe’s classic tale of human decadence and divine justice, The Mask of the Red Death!

This was fun… I probably took more time on this due to the size of the crowd… and despite my opinion on some of the choices Roger Corman made in his classic adaptation I couldn’t resist making Prince Prospero look just a little bit like Vincent Price.

I regret not having any place to put the clock.

And speaking of Vincent Price, enjoy his reading of the original story:

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Inktober Day Seventeen – Manticore

by on October 17, 2016 at 9:37 am
Posted In: Art

Inktober Day Seventeen - ManticoreToday’s inktober challenge was easy, or more accurately I couldn’t ‘t think of anything to do, besides just draw the manticore I was supposed to.

Nothing to really say about it other than a quick refreshing of the memory told me that the bat wings are a new innovation, so I left them out. (I missed the part where they said the same thing about the scorpion tail.

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Inktober Day Sixteen – Mermaids

by on October 16, 2016 at 1:55 am
Posted In: Art

Inktober Day Sixteen - MermaidsAs I mentioned in my first Halloween sketch challenge, one of my greatest desires is to make mermaids scary again. This is easier said then done because most people are distracted by the sexy while forgetting that’s just what the mermaids want you to do. For me the scariest mermaid scenes are not the ones where the mermaids drop the glamour and reveal a mouth full of sharp teeth and claws, It’s the subtle ones like in Hunter Thompson’s  The Rum Diary where the beautiful woman appears almost from nowhere leaning against your boat and you wonder how since you’re nearly a mile out from shore.

Unfortunately it’s hard to capture that kind of subtlety in one image… but I try.

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Inktober Day Fifteen – The Cats of Ulthar

by on October 15, 2016 at 9:47 am
Posted In: Art

Inktober Day Fifteen - The Cats of Ulthar
It was a busy day yesterday which include anticipating a big storm, that turned out to be a false alarm. That’s my excuse for not posting this until now… Mia Culpa!

So anyway on my this years list I had two cat entries and planned to toss the second one once I pulled one to avoid repetition. I was really hoping today’s topic, H.P. Lovecraft’s Cats of Ulthar would be the second.

While The Cat’s of Ulthar is a great story as far as the mythos is concerned it’s little more than a footnote, and I wasn’t sure that I would capture the level of scariness.

On a side note I kind of screwed up on this one. I reread the story after I did the story and was reminded that Ulthar was just a small town in the dreamlands… not the city I show here… The best excuse I can give is that this is Ulthar a few hundred years after the original story happened.

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Inktober Day Fourteen – Spiders

by on October 14, 2016 at 10:06 am
Posted In: Art

inktoberspiders2016101401I wasn’t sure about today’s picture, because quite frankly I’ve never found spiders scary. My father is an ecologist who studies crab spiders (he’s sited in the article I just linked) he used to pay me and my sister a 25 cent bounty for all the ones we could find. Creepy cobwebs on the window were a spectator sport and we used to feed them. I’m one of those people who lets the spiders out of the house when I find them in the kitchen.

So whenever I see movies like Tarantula and Eight Legged Freaks I laugh and nitpick the science.

But a lot of people are creeped out by them so I guess that makes them fair Halloween game.

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Inktober Day Thirteen – Dzunukwa

by on October 13, 2016 at 10:24 am
Posted In: Art

inktoberdzunukwa20161013For the thirteenth day of Inktober  we have one of the great ogres of Northwestern Native American Folklore, Dzunukwa aka Basket Woman aka the Whistling Woman. 

Dzunukwa is an interesting figure in Kwakwaka’wakw mythology on one side she’s a bogey figure meant to keep children out of the forest for fear of being captured and put her basket to be eaten. but at the same time she is occasionally seen as a wise woman and an ancestor figure for the Namgis clan.

She’s a common feature in native art I see every time I browse in galleries every time I go downtown. So it was fun to try and create a “real” version of the wooden masks.

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