You've Got Red On You

Shaun of the Dead is probably my favorite zombie movie of recent years.

George A. Romero's original 'Night of the Living Dead' from 1968 is still probably the scariest zombie flick.  Others have been fun but not as creepy.  And there've been a lot of them.  So 'Shaun of the Dead' stands out of the pack, a comedy with horror overtones instead of a horror movie with comedic overtones.  The movie's hilarious but manages to be scary at times too.  Zombie's in general at the moment stand out of the pack, in a time when Vampires and Werewolves are getting their teeth pulled and their six-packs exposed, someone decided horror should be romantic, but it's a lot harder to put sparkles on a zombie.  Earlier this year they did try with 'Warm Bodies' though...so the zombie thing might be wearing a little thin now too.  Even if every incarnation is good in it's own right you can definitely have too much of a good thing but 'Shaun' beat a lot of them to the punch and rightfully so.  As you may have guessed, I rewatched it recently and drew this a couple days later.  Done with markers and red Uniball.

Marilyn The Vampire Killer

I actually drew this not long after the last couple that I posted but I'm just now getting around to posting it on the blog.

The idea for this actually goes back quite a ways.  I was brain storming a bunch of cool poster ideas one night a few years ago and this was by far one of my favourites to come out of that.  I was distracted at the time though, trying to finish animation on my movie and ultimately forgot about it until something reminded me recently, so here it is.  I can't remember if there was any specific inspiration that lead to this idea at the time, I just remember thinking it would be a really cool image.  And I still think it is.  The idea originally was just to have her in front of a solid colour background but I decided just before drawing it that I wanted to add some vampires.  They were gonna be recognizable movie vampires at first but I couldn't decide on which ones to use since I didn't wanna have her with more modern movie vampires, considering she died in the 60's and that greatly narrowed my options so I went with my own vampires.  Keeping them black and white was a last minute idea too.  I remembered reading somewhere that once Marilyn made it big, part of her contract was that she would only appear in colour films.  The only exception that I know of that was ever made was 'Some Like It Hot' because the makeup they used to make Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis look like women was much more convincing in a black and white image.  So I thought having Marilyn be the only colour...er almost...in an otherwise black and white picture would be cool.  So there it is.  Sometime soon I wanna set up on some website and sell some prints...this'll definitely be one of them.

I didn't like the way I'd originally drawn her face so I stuck a post-it note on the paper and used my light table to draw a new one.  Tricks of the trade.

Mary Shelly's Frankenstein

For years I've said I wanted to read Mary Shelly's Frankenstein.  As a kid Frank was my favourite of the classic movie monsters...I went as him for Halloween once or twice.  The whole idea behind the crazy doctor and his monster is cool and creepy...and the fact that it was written by a nineteen year old in the nineteenth century just made the book more intriguing.  I finally got around to reading it this month.  I always knew the original Universal Pictures version of the story differed from the novel but I was still pretty surprised at just how different.  Even the movie entitled "Mary Shelly's Frankenstein" as I recall has a lot of changes in it although it's definitely closer than the Karloff version.  The book moves pretty slow actually and tends to wander on tangents that aren't always necessary.  I thought it bounced back and forth between painfully dull and genuinely freaky.  Shelly's descriptions of the monster are quite vivid and that's maybe what I was most surprised by when I read the book.  I don't think Frankenstein's monster has ever been depicted on film they way he's described in the book.  I drew this while I was reading it...

Here's how Shelly herself describes the wretch.  "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 shriveled complexion and straight black lips."

I figured if his skin was translucent from being stretched so thin then it would have been difficult to keep the ends together when sewing.  So I made sure to show some exposed meat beneath the skin at the seams where the stitches are barely holding him together.  It was a myth for years and years that your hair and finger/toe nails continued to grow after you died and I wondered if that's where Mary Shelly's idea for his flowing black hair stemmed from so I gave him long claw like finger nails.  I also skewed some of his parts so  he wasn't quite put together right, which is why his abs kinda stick to the one side.  I also cut a hole over his heart and then stitched it back up cuz I figured a delicate organ like that might've required frequent reaccess while he was being built.  And I reasoned that he might not have a lot of cartilage left in him either which is why I pulled his nose back like a skull.  This isn't a bad drawing but I think if I were designing him to appear in a movie or something I'd take a couple more passes.  I'd probably experiment with the stitching a bit, maybe see how it would look if it were more excessive and I'd definitely play more with his posture.

Of course...there's still a lot to be said for the classic...

Commission With a Side of Awesome Sauce

You may recall a couple months ago I posted a commissioned drawing of a guy, a girl and a couple of cats going up against an army of zombies.  If you don't, check it out here, and try to keep up.  Well anyway, that drawing was commissioned by the guy in the drawing as a gift for the girl in the drawing.  Make sense?  Hopefully, cuz here we go again.  The girl in the drawing then recently commissioned me to draw a new drawing as a gift for the guy in the drawing.  I feel like I could've explained that more concisely but I'm happy with how it turned out none the less.  Anyway, here's that new drawing now, I'm quite happy with the way it turned out and thankfully so were they.  Kim described it as 100% awesome sauce.

Now I know what you're thinking, "jeeze Dylan, isn't it kinda crass to plaster your company name and logo all over that poster?"  Well it would be, but those are just watermarks and I assure you they were not included in the version I handed over to them. 

I was given pretty clear instructions for the first poster.  Caillin really knew what he wanted, right down to the basic composition.  For this new one though I was given pretty much free reign to come up with something.  Kim gave me a run down of things she'd like to try and convey with the poster...I took that and we decided to keep with the same theme as the first poster so the two of them could work as companion pieces.  I came up with this, somewhat based on the poster from the original Conan The Barbarian poster.  I googled that though and it turned out I really wasn't remembering that poster correctly at all, so this may or may not look much at all like Conan, save for the raised arm.

Here're the stages of the drawing.  I draw it out in blue so once I ink it I can scan it without picking up my construction lines.  I used to have to erase all that stuff when I was done drawing...it burns the hell out of your arm and covers the desk and floor with eraser turds and who wants that, right?  It was another fun gig.  I'd like to do more of this kinda stuff.

Night of the Living Commission

Here's a drawing that Caillin Buck hired me to do. 

See the watermarks?  That means it's his, so back off.  The concept was all Caillin's.  He gave me specs on the characters and their outfits and a couple photos of the cats that these ones are based on.  I designed the Zombies totally from scratch but the composition is more or less his too.  It was a fun gig.  I invented the weapons though.  See the girl's stick with a playstation controller tied to it?  I'm proud of that and fully intend to build a working prototype for the pending zombie apocalypse.  You and me both know it's coming, it's only a matter of time.