A Muck Thing

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Muck ThingI have a fondness for certain specific types of monsters.

Giant Monsters. That is, any type of critter that’s 15 feet tall or taller. I’m not very discriminating about the bigger monsters. That size range covers everybody from the original King Kong to the Fifty Foot Woman to The Deadly Mantis to Godzilla. Screw the cube square law. I love over-sized monsters.

Fishman Monsters. The Monster of Piedras Blancas. The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The Humanoids from the Deep. The residents of Innsmouth. Any critter that’s an unholy cross between man and seafood makes me happy. (Except traditional mermaids. I’m not sure why. That top-half-human, bottom-half-fish arrangement just seems silly to me. I know that makes no sense.)

Frankensteins. My love for Frankenstein comes later than for the previous two categories. I had to read the novel before I really became interested. Since I’ve read a lot of sequels to/alternate versions of Mary Shelley’s novel and I’m working my way through various movie versions. I certainly have fun drawing versions of the creature.

Lovecraftian Things From Beyond. Not just the Cthulhu Mythos. Science fiction horror where the horror is a thing that exists outside human understanding? I’m not really sure how to describe it.

Sasquatches. I’d love it if there really is a Bigfoot, Yeti, Orang Pendak or other upright ape still wandering the earth. There aren’t a lot of good bigfoot movies but I’ve got a small library of entertaining novels and non-fiction books on the big fellow.

Muck/Swamp Monsters. Which finally brings me to the subject of this post. Fishmen and Sasquatches often hang out in swamps but they aren’t the same thing. A good swamp monster is at least part plant. There aren’t a lot of examples. Most of them are from comics. The Heap. Swamp Thing. Man-Thing. And … not a lot of other examples. In prose there’s Theodore Sturgeon’s It. In movies – bad adaptions of Swamp Thing and Man-Thing. There was a swamp monster in an episode of The Night Stalker.

I’m not really a plant person. I don’t have a green thumb. Give me a plant and I’ll show you a bunch of dead sticks in a pot a few weeks later.

I’ve never read any Heap stories. As far as I know there aren’t any collections of the old comics available.

I love the look of the Man-Thing but honestly I haven’t read many Man-Thing comics. The poor guy is mindless. It’s hard to root for him when you can’t even play fetch with him.

I read the original Swamp Thing series when I was a kid and a good chunk of the second series when it was being published. Those were good comics but it’s been a long time since I read any ongoing comic book series.

Yet I count Swamp Monsters among my favorite night bumping things. They’re green. They’re quiet. They usually don’t want to eat you. They like to play in the mud. They can’t drown. And they’re fun to draw.

The Monster Men

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This will be your only warning. I’m going to post images of naked people every now and then. I don’t expect to post any deliberate pornography or erotica but there will be folks without clothes. If you were a regular reader of the Skook sketch blog then you probably won’t be surprised.
It’s: Frankenstein in the Jungle!

Or maybe: Thirteen Frankenstein Monsters!

Or perhaps: Frankenstein vs Pirates!

Or: Mad scientist attempts to build the perfect mate for his daughter!

Tarzan meets Frankenstein with Pirates! Maybe?

Any way I describe it, The Monster Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs sounds like fun. And maybe, if you hadn’t read Frankenstein or Tarzan, you’d think it was a rip snorting adventure. It’s certainly got a lot of action. Unfortunately, for me, there was far too much running-around-being-chased-by-pirates action and not enough mad-science-monster action.

The idea behind the novel is more interesting than the novel that it inspired. One of these days I’d love to give the book a rewrite. There’s actually a lot that I think works. I just think it needs to be crazier than it is. The monster men don’t get nearly enough page time. And the ending is a cop out.

Perhaps I could start by doing an illustrated edition. In my copious spare time.

The above sketch is a version of Jack, the 13th Monster Man. Behind him is Virginia Maxon, the daughter of the scientist who creates the Monster Men. And behind them both is another one of the Monsters. Burroughs leaves most of the creatures undescribed. That leaves a lot of opportunity for an illustrator to have fun.

At The End of the First Week of the New Year

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Thanks to the instructions at Mamablogga I’ve transferred all the old posts from the original Skook sketchblog. I imagine that there will be some clean up to make sure that they all work for this site but that’s going to be a long term project. I’m posting larger images here than I did on the old blog so the older entries look a little puny. WordPress (which is what I use for this site) has post identifiers of both “categories” and “tags”. I’m not sure what the difference is but all my older blogspot post tags come through as categories. I’m not sure what if, anything I’ll do with that. With seven years of posts to go through, any revising done will take … more time than I want to think about. If you happen to find any posts that need fixing please post a comment or send me an email to let me know.

I’ve also been adding links over in the sidebar. I started with sites I visit regularly (that is, at least twice a month) and now I’m added sites that seem interesting. I’m open to suggestions. I tend to get stuck in patterns of subject matter and it’s refreshing to be pointed in a different direction now and then.

In physical world news I’m back in school after the Holiday break. I’m taking English Composition, Introduction to Computer Hardware and Introduction to Database Design. Without a math class (and the attendant homework) this quarter  I’m expecting the work load to be lighter.

To compensate for the lighter school schedule, I’ve signed up for Codeacademy, a free online coding program. I could use extra practice writing code. I attempted the first lesson yesterday and choked up before I was able to finish. I’ll give it another try today. Practice. Practice.

Over at Oz-Squad.com we posted the first chapter of Lizzie the Girl Knight. We’ll have a new chapter for you on the first of every month. Stay tuned!

Little Red: Detail Work

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Once areas of flat color have been laid down I can work on adjusting the details. If I don’t like a color I can adjust it. I use the colorization feature of Photoshop to change tones and shadows from their original grays to whatever hue fits best with main color of that area of the illustration.

I’m not quite finished with this illustration. I have a few small areas where I need to add or adjust colors but it felt done enough that when Nizzibet asked me to send her a copy I was happy to do so. Little did I realize that she ulterior motives. She used it for a present for a friend’s birthday.

New Hat Cup

I think it turned out pretty well. Any further adjustments I make will probably only be noticed by me. And any changes I make just make this cup more of a unique object.

Little Red: Flat Color

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Laying down flat colors is the least interesting part of creating an illustration. Sometimes it’s fun but mostly it’s a matter of making sure that you’ve filled in all the little spots where you want a certain color or made sure that all the large areas are outlined properly so that you can use the paint bucket tool to fill the middle. I put all the colors on a separate layer than the black and white art. You could do your coloring on the original art layer but making any changes if you make a mistake would be next to impossible.

Little Red: Shadows and Tones

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I Needs a New Hat GraytonesI prefer to finish as much of an illustration as possible on paper and save the computer for touch ups and special effects. I really like having a flat file filled with with completed drawings. I’ve used gray tone markers to shade the ground and Little Red’s skin. I used a B pencil for the fur and her dress. If I were intending this illustration to be black and white I might consider it done at this point.

This is a color piece, however, and color means Photoshop. I’ve got a shoe box filled with colored felt markers that rarely get a work out. I save them for the illustrations that I plan to give to people. When I’m creating an illustration for print or the web I do the color in Photoshop. It’s not because I think the program is better at color than the markers. I use it because it allows me to change my mind.

Tomorrow: Flat Colors

Little Red Inks

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I Needs a New Hat InkedYesterday I posted the pencil drawing/sketch of this illustration. Today I’ve posted the inked version. I sometimes do illustrations that are just pencil drawings but, for the most part, I like to ink at least part of the drawing. Ink gives good strong lines and areas of black that pencils generally don’t. That helps define the illustration and give the rest of the art something to react against.

If I were doing a simple black and white piece I’d ink in a few more details with a pen and be done but this is a color illustration so there’s a lot more to do.

Tomorrow: Shadow and Tone

First Official Post: Little Red Sketch

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Happy New Year! And welcome to my website. I’ve been posting sketches, drawings, illustrations, cartoons and various rants and rambles over at skook.blogspot.com since 2003. I’ve owned davidingersoll.com and davidleeingersoll.com since 2007 but until recently those addresses were pointed at a blogspot site that I really wasn’t giving much attention. I’ve got an epilogue.net gallery, a kaijuphile.com gallery, a deviantart.com account, a myspace account, a facebook account and I’ve posted art here and there around the net. I’m a regular scattered 21st century netizen.

I’d also like to be more organized and easier to find. So, while I’m sure I’ll continue to update at my various other web addresses,  I’m going to be focusing most of my attention here at Skookworks. There’s a lot to be done to get this site into the sort of comprehensive shape I’d like so if you run across a page that seems unfinished it probably is. I’ve got three galleries posted (see the Galleries page for direct links) and have more in the works.

For my first set of posts I’ll be doing a process series; showing and discussing the stages of an illustration from sketch to finished art.


I Needs a New Hat SketchMy first step in any illustration is usually a noodly little thumbnail sketch to figure out the basic composition of the illustration. Usually that little sketch is a barely legible thing and I almost never scan it or post it. I generally don’t think about scanning anything until I’ve done the pencil sketch that I’ll actually use for the final illustration. One of these days I’ll try to remember to document the early stage sketches.

The character in the sketch above is currently named Little Red. Her name may change if something more unique comes to mind. You can see a finished illustration of her in a couple of the header banners for this site. (They’re set to post randomly so she may not be featured in the one that’s currently showing. Click the refresh button if you’d like to see the other banners. There are currently four available.) She’s a character I first created in an illustration I did for Nizzibet’s birthday. We both liked her so much that I’ve adopted her as one of the mascots for this site and have a number of projects planned around her. I’ve done a few other small pieces with her but this is the first large one and the first in which she interacts with other characters.

Tomorrow: Inking.

Hello 2012!

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I will begin posting regularly here tomorrow.

There’s still a lot of work to be done on this site but if I waited for everything to be perfect I’d never leave the house.