And done. I’ve added highlights to the figure and cleaned up the fire and lightning so that there’s a strong contrast between the figure and background.
Happy Halloween!
With Halloween coming up in a few days I’m going to increase my posting so that the final version of this drawing posts on the 31st.
Originally I’d intended to just do a black and white illustration but adding color seemed like such fun that I couldn’t resist. This layer of color is colored pencil on the original drawing. It was at this point that I cut up the illustration and mailed it, piece by piece, to Coop.
And then I added shading and tone with a good old fashioned B art pencil.
Partly because I was working on this and partly because I noticed that the third book had come out I started reading Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein. Despite having a bit of an obsession for the Frankenstein Monster I don’t seem to need to pay attention to all the movies and novels that feature him (or versions of him). The movies are often entertaining. And, as I write this, I realize that, with the exception of a story by Brian Hodge in one of his short story collections I haven’t read any other prose continuations or sequels to Shelly’s novel. That’s not really surprising I suppose. My Frankensteinian interest is newer than most of my other monster obsessions.
I finished Prodigal Son the first book in Koontz’s trilogy. It’s an easy read – clean prose, short chapters and a variety of characters. I’ve got the other two volumes on request at the library. It will be interesting to see where the story goes.
Background blacks finished. On to the figure.
One of the more challenging parts of designing a new creature is finding new places to put the stitches. It’s obvious that the Frankensteins are chemists not surgeons. And it’s also pretty obvious that they have a thing for weird ugly scars. It takes effort to be this sloppy.
Sometimes the initial sketch takes the longest amount of time. In the case of this piece the inking was the most time consuming – lots of black. I suppose someday, when I’m in a hurry, I’ll resort to putting down outlines for where I want black and then filling in the darkness in Photoshop. I’ll be sad when that happens. I like having physical drawings that are finished in their own right.
This is my latest contribution to the A Patchwork of Flesh illustration blog. Or it will be once it’s finished. I did this sketch during a particularly dead day at the Day Job a month or so ago. Dead days are rare things there these days.
Coop at Patchwork asks people to send in 2.5″ x 3.5″ illustrations. That’s a great size to work at when you want to get a piece done quickly but it doesn’t leave a lot of room to play around. So I decided to do a larger illustration, cut it up and then send him the pieces. That seemed like a good Frankensteinian idea. I’ve been waiting to start posting this series until Coop got all the pieces in the mail. That happened today so …