Blood Island Confidential, continued...

Blood Island Confidential first panels

Yippee! 2009 will mark the beginning of the first Castle Monster Comic, "Blood Island Confidential" I know nothing about web-comic production, so every moment should prove to be a learning experience, although I have laid plenty of groundwork for it in the last year or so. I know this first couple panels don't give you much to go on but I'm aiming for satirical and hopefully, to the extent that a silly cheap-jack web-comic can be, creepy.

Archon

Uncle Forry R.I.P.

Famous Monsters of Filmland founder Forrest J. Ackerman died yesterday at the age of 92. I'll always remember the hours of joy the magazine brought me as a kid. May his memory live on.
AICN Obituary
Portraits by Mark Berry

Untitled

Some other dimensional something-or-other, just to break things up a little. I was going to make a finished color piece, but I'm thinking this sketch might be good enough. You get the idea.

Barbra in the Headlights

This is Barbara from Night of the Living Dead, and if you didn't recognize it shame on you! I'm pleased with how it turned out and I'll probably be doing more art like this in the future. I think I'll forget calling it "pause art" every time-I think you get the idea. I figured I might as well go to colored paper and colored pencils (well, black white and gray pencils, in this case). It will take longer I reckon, but it's worth it.

Pause Art #2

Here's an interesting shot (another drawing from a screen pause) of actress Andree Melly in the Hammer classic Brides of Dracula, one of the most iconic screen vamps in the history of vampire movies. I always thought she had a sort of Elsa Lanchester look about her: a little homely but with strangely alluring qualities at the same time.

"Unfresh"

Ironically, this last jack of the year was a little pulpy by the time I got to it. It was like a race against time. I'm pretty disappointed with my jacks this year. Nothing stands out much, though I kind of like "Duplicitous" as a spontaneous sort of piece. This last one started out as Karloff's Frankenstein, but the forehead ended up being too normal so I felt I had to make him into a zombie in order to salvage it. It could have been worse. Unfortunately, this guy, among other pumpkin sculptors I've found online, sort of leave me in the dust. I don't know how this guy cranks so many of them out.

I really have to think about not sculpting jack-o-lanterns in any great quantity anymore. Pumpkins are getting more expensive and what's the point of spending so much time on art that's not going to be around in a couple weeks? It seems like all of my pumpkins were too soft and thin-shelled this year.

I'll be happy when they develop synthetic jack-o-lantern pumpkins that are suitable for 3D sculptures like these but it seems for now no synthetic material has the particular qualities that makes real pumpkin flesh so ideal for jack-o-lanterns. I don't know that for a fact but if there were I don't know why guys like this would go on carving their amazing creations out of such a fleeting perishable medium.

"Zombi"

"Duplicitous"

"Chompsky"

Here's the first of five for 2008. I kept this one crude so it didn't take much time. It's an okay warm-up but the rind was to thin and mushy to make it worth much effort. It sort of reminds me of a Madball. Anyway, I suppose I like it enough to show it off.

"Lost"

This primitive piece came from planning I did for a larger piece where a horrid vampire feeds atop a ruined church overlooking a war-torn city, but I thought it worked as a more focused subject. This one didn't give me a lot of trouble. I like the composition, I think the bat-like vampire creature is kind of interesting and it has a sort of storybook quality to it. What the monster is perched on is something of a mystery. I suppose with a little cropping from the bottom and right it won't look so much like the two are hovering in the air. It could use some more tweaking and maybe I'll do the bigger (and tremendously more complex) piece at a later date but I'd just as soon move along for now.

Silly rabbit, Trix are for-...YEAAAARRRGH!

So it's a, um, rabbit. I think you can see that. And he's pretty well effed up, probably escaped from a laboratory or whatever. This one didn't take long. I started with a reasonably good drawing and touched it up a little and colored it. That's all.

Initially, I was thinking about making him green, like in the Bugs Bunny meets Dr. Jekyll cartoon. Maybe I'll go back and try that. Hmmmm.

This and all my recent artwork (that I'm not completely ashamed of) can be seen at the original Spooky Laboratory, which is part of my larger site The Castle Monster. The inspiration for the title "Spooky Laboratory" comes from the "Korn Halloween Special" of the show South Park. An interesting aside, there actually is a South Park region of Colorado. My mom even grew up there.

Wuzzat?

Oh, for Christ's sake! So I have to write a first blog post, huh? Well, here you go. There. That make
you happy? WELL, YOU CAN GO TO HELL!

Hehe... Just a little levity to kick things off. I don't have anything to start off with, really. I'll just be using this blog to talk about my nartwork (it seems that I'm a nartist) and talk about new things that catch my fancy and crack wise about news items and what not. And that will grow inevitably into an empire and I will own you. So try to stay on my good side.

So, hmmm, now what? I guess I'll have to think about it. I know you'll stay tuned.