sketchbookfactory

I like monsters. Especially the old Universal Monsters. The Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Vincent Price stuff from the 30’s and 40’s. I particularly love the posters. Like this and this. Whenever I see one of those old sci fi horror posters my heart kinda skips a beat.

I wish I enjoyed actually watching the movies. They’re fun, but (IMHO) they never quite live up to the promise of the poster. And yes I do realize that any movie made almost 100 years ago is not going to have the pacing a 2016 audience is used to, but still… in the Bride of Frankenstein the Bride doesn’t even show up until the last five minutes of the movie! If you call the movie BRIDE of Frankenstein then I think you owe it to the audience to give the bride a little more screen time.

Anyhow, when I see those old posters they get my imagination going. Pretty much every play I have ever written has a monster in it somewhere. Sometimes other people will suggest that I do this as a metaphor for how people can be monsters, but if that’s true it’s a subconscious thing. Metaphors are for people smarter than me.

Okay enough with the random ramble about monsters. I’ve posted recently about how I’ve been doing these distorted pencil sketches of people wherever I can, and then after a little time and brainstorming, I will ink it and add some kind of background setting. Here’s my latest drawing like that.

I sketched this guy at Space 55 one night, and then a few days later when looking back at it I realized that the shadows under his eyes, the hollowed out cheeks, and the long neck made him look a little mad scientisty.

So I decided to put him in a Frankenstein-type laboratory. I google image searched “Frankenstein comic strips” or something like that, to generate some ideas for simple things I could put in the background that would suggest a lab. The background that I came up with is a mishmash of about 3 or 4 of those.

That’s right, I’m a thief.

By the way, if you haven’t read the book Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon run–don’t zombie walk–to your local library and get it.

Initially I wanted to do a really limited palette on this. I was planning to go monochromatic blue. But then for some reason I didn’t think that would work, so I expanded the palette to cool colors. I’m glad I did. I like how that blue works against the green.

When I look at this drawing I notice that my ellipses are off, the shadow under Frankie’s operating table is going the wrong way, the machine on the right could have been drawn a lot cleaner, and the window ledge is at totally the wrong angle. That’s annoying because when I was inking it I consciously tried NOT to do these very things.

But after all these years, it might be time to embrace the fact that mistakes, flaws and deformities are just a part of my style. My drawings are clunky and awkward, kinda like me. Maybe I should go with it.