I quite like the sketch on the left. It’s a got a nice grace to the lines.
The sketch on the right is … okay.
Garuda / Mr. Pensive
I’m not really happy with these. It’s not that I think they’re bad sketches – if I did I wouldn’t have posted them – they’re just not what I had in mind when I started drawing.
Catperson / Twister
Sketches from January or February of this year done to get myself back into the habit of drawing.
Bite You
Most fans/writers/illustrators of horror/monsters have a favorite take on the vampire. I prefer the undead corpse type over the gloomy romantic type but I don’t have any problem with both types having fans. Vampires can be brooding aristocrats, perky goths, seductive pansexuals, immortal slackers, deadly ninjas and disgusting bloated ticks in human form. Most f/w/i also have a vampires story or two in them. I do. I doubt I’ll get around to telling but it’s there if I ever find the time.
Ogre / Mountaineer
Another couple of sketches from January. Practice practice.
Getting Back into Rhythm
These two sketches are from the beginning of this year. Mostly they’re attempts to get myself drawing again. In January I was feeling pretty exhausted. We’d just spent large chunks of December moving out of our old apartment and I was starting a new job. I didn’t have it in me to work on any of the larger projects that were on my plate. The drawing on the left is an image that came to me as I was drawing it. The sketch on the right is a swamp monster that has turned up in my sketches on a regular basis over the last couple of decades.
Justine Frankenstein
Frankenstein started inspiring adaptations, rip-offs and sequels soon after publication. In 1818 the copyright laws did little to prevent it. The novel continues to do to this day. One sequel I recently read was The Mad Scientist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss in the online magazine Strange Horizons. I thought it was charming story and would have loved to have done a portrait of the cast. Unfortunately I didn’t have the time then (soon after our move to the new apartment), nor do I have the time now (with much busyness at the day job and much Oz Squad on the drawing table), to work on one. All that I managed was the sketch on the left of Justine, Frankenstein’s “Daughter”. If you’ve read the novel you can guess her providence without reading the story. Read it any way.
The drawing on the right has nothing to do with The Mad Scientist’s Daughter that I can think of. I had the image in my mind insisting that I draw it and so I did.
Ackroyd’s Frankenstein
I read Peter Ackroyd’s The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein this last April. I’d been inspired to do so after reading an announcement that Timur Bekmambetov is planning to direct a film adaptation of the book. I’d heard of the book when it first came out but my interest in reading it had been tempered by my having read that Ackroyd mixes the story of Frankenstein with the biography of Shelly. Percy Shelley, not Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly. And, honestly, I don’t have a lot of interest in Percy Shelley. These days I get a lot of my reading from the library and the process of reserving a book on line is really simple so I went ahead and ordered. And once the book arrived I read. That’s probably obvious, right?
It reads like Ackroyd was a fan of (Mary) Shelley’s novel and who, being also a writer of biographies and a fan of Percy Shelley, decided to combine his interests. And write a logical, realistic novel than (Mary) Shelley did. Which he does. Ackroyd spends a lot of time with Frankenstein’s research into bringing life back to the dead. No longer is the Monster a stitched together giant. Now he’s a recently deceased fellow who had willed his body to science. Frankenstein is no longer the insufferable self-absorbed whiner. He no longer abandons the Monster – the Monster runs away. The Monster kills a couple of people and then feels bad about it. Maybe it’s all a dream or Frankenstein is insane.
Ackroyd even rehabilitates (Percy) Shelley by having the Monster kill his first wife instead of her killing herself after Shelley abandoned her as happened in real life.
I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the novel. I did. It is well written. Better written, certainly by today’s standards, than the Mary Shelley original. It has a plot where consequences follow actions, characters who are have some depth and nuance and the number of highly unlikely coincidences are kept to a minimum. I’m sure that it could be the basis for an entertaining movie.
An Unexpected Find
So I was poking around io9, one of my favorite nerd sites, today and found this. What a nice surprise!
The credit really goes to Pierre Fournier, the man behind Frankensteinia, who has been gathering all that wonderful Frankenstein emphemera in the first place.
Wired 2010
This is the last of four redrawings of a series of images I originally drew in 1990. I’m tempted to make this a tradition and redraw these images every five years or so.
We’ll see how I feel (or if I remember) in 2015.
