Where the hell did that time go ?

Good grief - I knew it had been  a while since I posted but didn't realise it had been quite THAT long :) There is a reason for this however. For those not following me elsewhere, I've been working on an illustrated horror anthology with american author Sean Walter that we started, well, about this time last year and have just taken on tour.

Tales in Sombre Tones book cover.

The book features 24 stories, each with their own full page illustration. Sean and I had a great time - some stories Sean wrote to go with illustrations I already wanted to do, such as the new Stephen piece. Some illustrations were done to compliment his own monsters and some pairings we took great delight in inventing between us.

The first 12 illustrations of 24

Not content with just doing a book, we created an entire touring show, for which Sean flew in to do live readings. The desk models helped out with more animation, we had sign language readings and are now working on 3d versions of the art for the blind and partially sighted.

Tales in Sombre Tones on tour at All Saints Church, York.

To see where we are headed next with all this, literally and figuratively, visit the project website or Tales in Sombre Tones on Facebook. To buy the book, original artwork and fine art prints, head to Drawing in Dark.

Back In Black

Well, hello :) It's been a while - lots going on behind the scenes here so we have some catching up to do. How are you doing ? Good I hope.

Probably the biggest single thing that's changed is my UK website, I started over with Wix and have been able to add lots more features so the site is now a proper studio tour.

 From the beginning I wanted to make more of a connection between you the viewer seeing the artwork and me making it so that's one of my front paws right there on the home page :)

Stephen now has his own corner of the website - as his file continues to grow with contributions from other talented creatives and fans, I wanted somewhere to share and showcase new elements as they are added. If you'd like to play along, go see.

I've built up a complete collection of my crow drawings and added a new line in printed loveliness. Pocket mirrors, notebooks and prints are now available to buy here. I have more designs and products coming over the next few months.

In the bag

Following on from my last post, I did finally finish my illustration for Sean Walters story 'An Invited Guest'. It's now available to buy printed with the tale in my Etsy shop. 

This was an interesting piece to work on - featuring a non traditional representation of death as a dark figure, his features hidden beneath a sack. I wanted the image to have an overall recognisably human shape but with a touch of otherness so I built a foam skull, working from a deer skull I had. I added suitably pointed teeth and covered it with the sack.

 To create a dark image, I photographed the piece in a black mirror so only the highlights would show. A lamp picked out the fine details such as the wispy beard I had given him.

 The drawing itself was done in charcoal and carbon on watercolour paper. I got through a lot of carbon on that background :) The finer details were picked out with a knife blade.

Now framed, I'm quite pleased with the overall effect - I've also gone on to do a lot more photography using that mirror. More on that in my next post. The image itself reveals more the longer you look at it. I exhibited it at this years Dark Arts show as part of the Bram Stoker International Film Festival.

Monsters everywhere !

Total chaos here this week as I launched a new Kickstarter campaign for the monsters. I'm going to be showing them at Dark Arts again this year here in Whitby and after thinking how interested people were in their individual stories, decided to make something of it. In this case, more monsters and, if we do well enough, a book about them.

We wanted to the project to reflect what it's like to live with these things so made our own short video black and white movie style, complete with wibbly stop motion. You can see that here.

We also used the time to create an entire folder for our favourite monster, Stephen, including a map of the asylum where he lurks, newspaper cuttings and patient files.

We've also tried to explain what it's like dealing with these things day in, day out ( hence Rich in full monster wrangling outfit). We love what we do but it can be hard work, they come and go when they please and make working with children and animals look like a breeze. So, if you have a minute to do something fun, pop over to our page and if you can, support us - either by pledging or sharing on social media. It all helps :)

Meet the monsters :)

It's all go here as I prepare Stephen for his first public appearance at the Dark Arts exhibition in Whitby. The show runs from October 24th-26th at the Spa Pavilion, free entry so do come along and say hello if you're in the area.

I've not taken my nightmares out in daylight before, so it will be interesting to see how folks react up close and personal. It's fantastic having a show like this on our doorstep, though a little nerve wracking allowing strangers access to such personal pieces.

I've got some prints and of course the original drawings but I'm also prepping some pages revealing Stephens history and showing some of the research/prep work that goes into creating something like him.

I may even take along sketchbook and pencils so I can do some drawing while I'm there, so long as the organisers don't mind black fingerprints everywhere :) 

Something under the bed....

 Most of you will be familiar by now with the great and terrible Stephen. It's been a while since I had the time to work on a new nightmare so I'm especially pleased to announce the completion of the first picture of Stephen in his natural habitat.

 He's always clung to the shadows, I don't think he likes being around people so an abandoned building seemed the most appropriate hiding place for a shy monster. Given the uncertainty as to where and what he came from, an old asylum had the right combination of creepy and isolated.

 This is my biggest piece to date, worked in carbon pencil on watercolour paper. Rich and I made a scale model bed and set up photographs to get exactly the shot I wanted. Stephens shadow has always fascinated me and so we backlit the frame to reveal just his hands and the shadows reaching out toward the viewer.

I added in peeling wallpaper and a couple of objects for Stephen to play with - he's inquisitive and with all those hands, likes picking things up.  I'm hoping to have prints done of this one soon - in the meantime, you can buy the original Stephen drawing here.

Sing a song of Stephen

 Like many artists, I sometimes 'see' things that aren't there. Or maybe they are. I don't know. Anyhow, of all those lurkers in my peripheral vision, the one that I get asked about most often is the great and terrible Stephen. So, here's his full story for you to...um...enjoy ?

Stephen charcoal drawing

It all started with a song - the actual track by Alice Cooper is titled 'Steven' but I changed the spelling as otherwise there may have been a terrible temptation to address him as 'Steve' and I don't even want to think about what might happen then.

Should you decide to dip a toe in the water, you can find it on YouTube along with 'Years Ago' which was another of his personal anthems. It's best listened to at good volume with your eyes closed, it's actually a fantastic piece of music once it gets going but it is very, very creepy.

Prep work for Stephen

I'm still not sure where things like Stephen come from. When I'm working on them they are as real to me as the chair I'm sat in but whether that just means I'm barking, I have no idea. I find they tend to come around in the early hours when I'm alone. I like to have my headphones in to cut me off from the rest of the world so I'm not distracted. It's often as if there is a quality to the music I have on that attracts them in the same way that different aromas will draw in different animals.

The first impression I got of Stephen was of something squatting with his hand against a wall or a door, as if to keep something else out. I drew more hands and arms thinking I was looking for the right posture when I realised they all belonged to the same thing. I still couldn't see how it all came together though. I tried adding a spider body but that wasn't right so for the next year or so I spent a lot of time experimenting with different arrangements in the hopes it would become clear.

Stephen never really went away and I kept returning to my sketches, gradually pairing up arms and getting a sense of how he moved. A good couple of years after I'd first started work on him, I had what has to be the most disturbing nightmare I've ever had.

Stephen early sketch

He was in the house and started coming out of one of the cupboards, arms first. His limbs unfolded and extended which is when I first knew he had that extra joint in each one. I ran away but something made me go back, I think I wanted to make him leave but each time I found his hidey hole I would suddenly find myself standing outside the house in the dark. This happened again and again in different rooms and it became apparent that he was somehow in control, was making me lose time and keeping me away.

When I woke, I was in a complete panic and Rich had to get up and search every inch of the house with me. Needless to say, it was a sleepless night after that.

Stephen arm bones

That whole experience did however give me most of the information I needed to start putting together a plan of his anatomy. I always test my initial sketches by working them from the bones up, to be sure I have them right. Only if the blueprint for want of a better word matches the proportions of my original drawings do I consider them to be true and go on to do a finished piece.

His head was the last piece of the puzzle - for a long time I wasn't even sure he had one but as I got closer to a complete image, I could see him in my minds eye moving around and realised that his head was slung low, which is why his eyes are on the bottom half of his face.

Stephen portrait

The picture you see on Pyewackett and Pecke of him side on is, to me, the single most important piece I have ever done. There will be other images of him in abandoned buildings but that particular drawing is when I was closest to him and he came all the way out into the light. It's also when most of my fear went away.

Stephen is an odd one - we've learned to live with him but he's still unsettling. It would be strange without him though. I get the feeling he was maybe a person once but has been by himself for so long he's become confused, something else. Not a creature you could or would want to engage with but he's done us no harm so we just live around each other.

High society

Well, we've been busy. Recent changes to Etsy have meant we are now able to use print on demand services to create all kinds of fun things using our artwork and photographs.

We joined Society6 and now have our own shop over there which is serving as a gallery shop featuring all our works under one roof ! It has other benefits too - we're in the UK but most of our work goes to customers in the USA. Fine for originals which are worth the shipping costs but not so handy when someone is looking for a birthday card or a small print to fill a space in their wall. 

It has been so easy to use and frankly a lot of fun watching our designs turn into everything from cushions to mugs, it's got my partner Rich drawing again - in fact our first sale over there has been a t-shirt featuring his giant horde print on the clock above :)

Remember our puppets ? Well, funny bunnies are taking over as well, we're hoping to get some more photos done this week. They are so expressive and a joy to photograph so we had to include them too !

It's also meant that artwork which has been sold is now available as prints too which is very satisfying :)

K'wi

Remember K'wi ? He used to be in my art shop gracing greeting cards.  He's a funny little object, with his soft body and curved beak and like most of my monsters, has become a permanent part of the family.

So much so in fact that Rich has made one :) He started with a wire frame covered with plaster bandage then papier mache painted in acrylic with a clear layer on top. His beak and claws are black enamel and his bristles black plastic.

 He's amazingly detailed, from the wrinkles in his skin to the texture of his claws.

 We also had an awful lot of fun setting up his very own photo shoot showing K'wi in his natural habitat, complete with ferns and a pool...

 K'wi is now available to buy along with other friends over on our other Etsy shop here.

Shadows

More fun with monsters here this week- I've done the first prints of our model Stephen for me to draw from. Not only have they made life a whole lot easier in terms of getting perspective and lighting right but there have been some unexpected bonuses...

Probably the most fascinating thing I've seen so far is how his shadow changes depending on how I light the model. Sometimes it's very spider-like as with the picture above, other shots have a man shaped shadow like the one below (which I'm sure is sneaking off on its own).

He's not attached to a base because we already have plans for a bigger, more mobile version which is a slightly worrying thought. For now I'm making good use of my paper stubbies by way of props.

Because these pictures are just for reference I also don't have to worry about them being perfectly crisp which means I've been able to play about with my camera and get some interesting shots of him creeping about in the dark - the one above is a test for one of him looking in a window. He does that...

Baubles !

 It may come as a surprise to some but goths do Christmas too - complete with tree (and no, it's not black). We even added some shiny silver baubles, not that they stayed on there for long....
 Those who read our last post know we've made a model Stephen using, amongst other things, some of our tree decorations. But where, you wanted to know, were his baubles ?

To get the range of movement we needed in his shoulders we needed ball and socket joints - we could have bought them online but having come up with the idea of making a Stephen, naturally we wanted to play with it now and couldn't wait that long.

 We had a bag of black plastic beads left over from making bookmarks and some tubing that would fit into that to make our ball- but what to use for the socket? It turned out that the little collar with the hanging loop on top of our baubles was just the right size- and joy of joys, they simply pop off !

 We cut a small section of tubing and glued it into the hole in the bead. Rich cut a hole in the top of the collar and threaded the ball part through post first to complete the set.

 The collar was then glued into a hole cut into the main body, making sure not to get any adhesive on moving parts ...

When that had set, the post was covered in glue and slotted into a hole drilled in each of the limbs. Then we had to wait impatiently for the whole thing to dry before we could play with it :)

The first model was such a success and has already been useful in setting up drawings that we then made a hand to scale for him. Of course, that did mean going to buy another tub of baubles......

Monster in motion

 From an artists' point of view, demons have a lot in common with cats- they don't want to know until it looks like something else is getting all the attention... of course, those of you who know Stephen already will appreciate why, when it comes to elbowing everyone else out of the way, he wins every time.

That's all well and good but he's not the easiest thing to draw straight from my head, it's far too easy to wind up with a bit on backwards/upside down. So over coffee Sunday morning I asked my other half if he thought we could make a model of some kind. That way, I could play with different compositions and get all my lighting right before starting a big piece.

 I'll get into the 'how' properly in my next post but you may be amused to know that our new Christmas decorations didn't last long on the tree before we found an altogether more fun use for them :)

Of course, I'm saying 'we' but you're probably under no illusion that I had anything much to do with the actual construction asides from working out the sizes of various bits, some sanding and the important task of watching what was going on. 

Today the last of the glue had dried and I was able to start playing with him- just some test shots with a lamp of a new pose I was working on but he's amazingly effective - I can even get him stood on his back legs reaching up and adjust his limbs in sequence. Of course, I now want one of each of our resident nightmares done like this - best get some more baubles in !

This last has to be my favourite shot so far, stretching up - that shadow makes me grin every time I look at it :) In my next post I'll get into more detail of how we did it, then in the new year drawing should start in earnest of Stephen in action...