Once the initial illustration has been scanned into Photoshop (and any glaring problems cleaned up) I create a duplicate layer, set to multiply and blurred 5 pixels using the gaussian blur filter. That adds a bit more … meat … to the original illustration.

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.

The blacks are basically all in here. I’ll add a little more with a pen before I start shading but that will be minor stuff. I turned up the contrast on this scan so I could get a sense of what the illustration would look like in just black and white.

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 …

I did a new illustration for A Patchwork of Flesh and Coop has begun posting it. I’ll be doing a follow up here once he get all the parts up.

Many film Frankenstein’s have been happy to do what the novel’s Frankenstein refused to do – create a mate for the monster. Besides Bride of Frankenstein we’ve been presented with female creatures in Frankenstein Created Woman, Frankenstein the True Story, The Bride, Frankenstein Unbound, Frankenhooker and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I’m sure I’ve missed a few.

The illustration above is inspired by Helena Bonham Carter’s creature in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. I’m rather fond of this version of the story. It’s bombastic and operatic and generally over the top. The biggest misfire is De Niro’s performance as the creature. He’s got no otherworldliness about him. He’s ugly but he’s not Wrong, an aberration. Ah well. One of my favorite reviews of the film can be found at And You Call Yourself a Scientist. Go and read!

Frankenstein’s creation, as described in the novel, has never appeared on film. Mostly we’ve been given reanimated patchwork corpses. When I reviewed the novel I came to the conclusion that, while some of ingredients originated in the charnel houses the creature had to be more than just stitch together body parts. There are a couple of films that apparently come close in appearance – Hallmark’s 2004 miniseries and Frankenstein vs. the Creature from Blood Cove – but even they are unlikely to have presented him in his full glory. Shelley doesn’t give much of a description –

“His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!-Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath: his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriences only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips”

Beyond that he’s eight feet tall and, unlike most of the slow lurching film versions, he can move swiftly, with agility and quietly.

A good recent depiction I’ve seen was by Steven R. Bissette for, of all things, a recent translation of the Phantom of the Opera. For some reason my links to his site aren’t working so you’ll need to go to http://srbissette.com and look around in the sketch section.

Berni Wrightson did an incredible illustrated edition of the novel (the 1834 version) in the early nineties. His creature is both sad and hideous.

So the portrait at the top of this entry is my version of novel’s creature as he might have looked in the century after the novel’s events. He’s older. He’s, if not at peace with humanity, no longer at war with the world. He’s found a place for himself and his kind, hidden away in the place human beings don’t think to look.