🖤Gruß vom Krampus🖤 Misunderstood monsters and a texture brush geek out

in

This week I’m sharing a time lapse of my Krampus inspired painting, been as it’s Krampusnacht and all that! Oh, and a quick poem from the misunderstood horned goat god himself…..

So many hours and layers......my drawing hand is now aptly claw-like. Krampus has been a favourite character of mine since I was a teenager. Having discovered an Austrian postcard depicting this peculiar demonic companion to a seemingly accepting Saint Nick, I was confused and then utterly delighted. One of these days I'm going to get myself over to the Tyrol for a proper Krampus parade, horned up to the merry eyeballs.

When drawing this piece I realized plastic and baubles take a good getting into before they resemble themselves, very satisfying when you finally achieve a texture that's been driving you nuts. Still work to go on the horns and extra highlights generally, and to decide on a light direction to try and unite the elements a little more, but almost there...... It's all practice. And practice makes stiff fingers and crossed eyes and an empty cafetiere.

Gruss Vom Krampus time lapse

Painted in Procreate. Animated using Motionleap and edited with InShot

Music : Yeah Yeah Yeahs ‘Spitting Off the Edge of the World’ and snuck in some Krampus soundtrack elements to add creep…….

Geek stuff:

As usual I primarily used spray-can medium nozzle brush for drawing and shading, it’s my absolute comfort zone-my equivalent to a soft pencil. For some of the textures I have compiled a little tutorial video below.

Hair and fur; layering up and building texture dark to light using the default Procreate hair brushes in the Materials folder- as well as a set of ‘Nilyn’ hair stroke brushes which are available free to download and import online.

Sequinned skirt: Possibly the first time I used this brush, and now it’s become a ‘sequin’ brush for me, so perfect. It’s the default brush in Procreate’s ‘Abstract’ folder called ‘Opticon’.

Background: Another win with the default Procreate ‘clouds’ brush, in the ‘elements’ folder. Using a large brush and low opacity and gradually adding more dynamic shapes u til a spooky cloudscape is achieved!

The font is ‘Medusa’ with a Gaussian blur layer behind, I love this font and the fun of rasterising and smudging the hell out of it.

Brush tutorial in Procreate

And now a poem……

Always the meanie-it gets my goat

When all I want is to care for and dote

On kiddiwinks good, bad and in between

I’m really not keen on removing your spleen

I’d rather hang out and do something fun

I leave art supplies but you grumble a ton

It’s not out of spite I wrap you up coal

I encourage artistic practice for the soul

I don’t have a list, you’re not under surveillance

Not like St Nick minions who run out of patience

With elves on shelves keeping an eye

On every wrong doing, the Yuletide spies

Me, I’m a hoot, I’ll show you a time

I eat from a trough and my beard too is sublime

I don’t get the deal with rosy cheeked Santa

He’s high on elf bars and chilled cans of Fanta

Father Christmas and all that jazz

He spends his December off on the razz

I’m the one working hard on the books

Admin assistant and on tenterhooks

For the one day of the year my ‘boss’ does some work

Gets dressed up in red and acts like a jerk

I know I look scary, with horns and all the rest

I’m beast with the biggest of hearts in my chest

I’m not gunna bundle you into a sack

If your behaviour this year was slack

I’d never make you into a pie

I’d give you a cuddle, I’m just really shy……

Misunderstood for so many years

Feared by all, it brings me to tears

Underneath the monstrous demeanour

Is a fun loving guy and pro trampoliner

I won some trophies back in the day

My reputation got trashed and they took them away

I’ve a spring in my step, a twinkle in my eye

I’m kind, I’m Krampus! …………………And I love to lie……..

Rough sketch then working light on dark and layering up in Procreate.

Details

Inktober 2022 Week 4: I actually completed the damn thing

in

For the first time since giving the Inktober thing a go, I actually completed the damn thing. 31 days of drawing, editing and posting a concept. The final week of originals are below. My intention now is to cherry pick any ideas and characters I think could be developed into some sort of narrative and finally, FINALLY get a real start on some book pages. I’m really chuffed to have stuck to the daily deadline and although I don’t expect every piece to mean anything or be of future relevance, the month of crazy process has been great. It has invoked emergency without depriving room for creative thinking (I hope). And, other than a sore hand from hours of scribbling, And a few late night finishing things, Ive somehow squeezed it into my working week/weekends. I now have a new catalogue of images to play with, whether they be a spring board for an entirely new piece, or I create a collage-like amalgamation of characters. I’m excited and as always a little disturbed by what came out and shall be working through the winter on tying together this dark surreal world filled with masked freakoids pining to be understood…..

Final week of bonkers video art to portray my Inktober daily drawings:

Inktober 2022 week 3: moon mad

in

Week three continued the journey to the moon, where I encountered a wolf donning human clothing and a coy, one armed porcelain moon child…..I am beginning to recognise themes and characters which I shall be stuffing aggressively into a peculiar new world soon enough, for the sake of clearing up this junk cupboard of a mind I have. Here are the original drawings:

And here are the little weirdo critters brought to life……

Inktober 2022 week 2: demon zoo

in

Week two, still on the glitter demons, though they are becoming fairly animalistic…..managing to stay on track but already regretting my ridiculous idea of animation everything……..it’s so much fun though!

The original drawings are below, followed by a video showing the entire week of work.

Week 2 video artworks

Inktober 2022 week 1: creature discomfort

in

Kicked off the first week of Inktober putting far too much time into each piece, as I knew I would. I am bad at slapdash……..But, with a looming daily deadline, I did at least have the self- restraint to stop me going too far into the world of just one concept. I began with a notion of some characters I can only describe as ‘glitter demons’, small cherubic and playful folk, tiny tricksters perhaps. My original intention was to keep things simple, follow the theme and share a drawing a day. What actually happened was an overwhelming urge to bring these bejewelled beings to life….and so I added an extra stage of work by animating and creating mini video artworks for each piece. I think this compulsion is thanks to my scrutinising inner narrator……a stagnant image with no story attached seemed like a get out. What I wasn’t expecting was for the video editing process to add so much feeling to the images, in some ways this was a necessary experiment to force my noggin into conjuring what the story was, or at the very least the essence and the mood-to conceive these creatures and the way they move and chucking music on top managed this better than I predicted.

Below are the drawings I created this week and below that is the video artwork

All images drawn up in Procreate, played about with in Videoleap and edited in InShot.

Week 1 video artworks

Handmaidens of the eternal: away with the faeries

in

Death and faeries this week……firstly a time lapse of what I call the ‘inbetween stage’-adding the initial areas of shadow and colour. There will be a lot of layering and detail to go. This bit is fun and loose and just me fathoming out the composition. This is one of a few paintings I have been putting thought into on the theme of the faerie soul; although these folkloric beings appear mostly cutesy in popular culture, I’m more interested in the dark and mischievous aspects of what they represent in the human experience. T

Time lapse of sketching phase

Music: The Dance`of Death by Audiomachine

he Latin root word for fairy is ‘fay’ meaning fate. No concrete outline for this project just yet but the faeries have taken hold….

Fathoming out composition and playing with colour

As autumn creeps over us I’ve been bonkers for conkers.....conkers smuggling contraband in the form of red locked fairies in hibernation. I love the symbology of magic sleeping and dormant inside the seeds of the trees, awaiting invocation. This concept is rooted to a few ghost stories I am conjuring, and edging towards Samhain gets me in the spooky mindset. Ghost stories and fairytales were my favourite as a child, the tingle on my skin as I imagined the antagonist wandering into fateful woods……these tales of wandering into the unknown were and still are a pure joy.

 

Time lapse of a conker faery

Music: ‘September Song’ Agnes Obel

Time lapse

Music: ‘Move on’ Anna Von Hausswolff

 

The autumnal hues of greens and oranges won over here for my palette choice. I am obsessed with this fiery haired cherubic aesthetic…..

 

Time lapse video of the colour layering

Music: ‘In the tall grass’ Cinderwell

 

According to Arthur Conan Doyle, faeries are ‘The handmaidens of the eternal’. I’ve been researching the stories connecting faeries and the inbetween…….including many an account of those convinced they were lured by the little folk to a feast, only to suddenly realise they are being coerced into a dance of the dead. I find these detailed anecdotes fascinating, the mix of reality and faeryland as an exploration of a person’s psyche. For now I am busy layering up these little sprites from dark to light as they lead me through both….

 

Sketch to colour time lapse

Music: ‘All alone’ Like what

 

Ginger cherub Angel/faery/horned sprite vibe…….

Cosmic Sand Worm (time lapse)

in

Angry sand worms spring from the enlightened skull of a desert drifter. I am falling deeply in love with turquoise star light. So satisfying cleaning up those beam edges. This was originally a black and white piece I was playing with yonks ago, initially inspired by an Inktober prompt ‘dune’.

Black and white illustration

When I hear the word ‘dune’ my mind is taken swiftly to the philosophical sand storms whirling about in the head of Frank Herbert. I see the baron lands of Lynchian Sandworms, the forbidden zone in Beetlejuice occupied by almost comically crude ghost predators munching on entities lost in limbo.....(and as a side note, also the movie that introduced me to both Geena Davis and Winona Ryder as well as the concept of goth and misery and humour in one neat little fearless package-so pretty significant) This was my starting point. Embracing fully my nerdery when it comes to all things fantasy and sci-fi during the 80’s and 90’s (before I had friends to intervene), these granular memories thrust me through a wormhole of nostalgia. I was scribbling down witches and monsters and conjuring up dystopian worlds way beyond the PG rating using a multicolour biro pen. From the moment I realized my creations got reactions-particularly concerned ones from adults and petrified ones from younger kids, I was addicted. No surface was safe from a Dali-esque doodle.......Forever propelled into a healthily unhealthy obsession with all things surreal and gore. When my sister chose Disney movies, I was clutching a rental vhs with the most gruesome front cover I’d managed to find.....(imagine a seven year old waving the hellraiser movies about with utter glee) This illustration is a melding together of childhood nightmare and intrigue. The triangle carved into the skull is in reference to the higher consciousness they were all hooked on in the 1984 Dune movie, going nuts for the spice etc., (an aspect of the story I didn’t grasp as a kid, long before I discovered caffeine and other worldly mind altering fun stuff), and also a nod to the excellent reworking of Pink Floyd’s ‘eclipse’ which Hans Zimmer has created for the remake. Queen of waffledom at your service.

Full time lapse

Colour illustration

Finished colour illustration

illustrated in Procreate (sketch and colour using spray can, star brushes and luminescence brushes for glittery fabulousness, various texture brushes for sand and cloud brushes for angry worm breath magic) animated using Motionleap

Music mashup: Beetlejuice theme song Danny Elfman, Eclipse Pink Floyd Hans Zimmer cover, metamorphosis. Philip Glass

Worm food ecstasy

in

One of a few new paintings I’ve begun on the theme of childhood; worms, playing in dirt, revelling in exploration (minus the judgement……) The memory of feeling high on curiosity is something I desire to recapture. It’s a space we inhabit less and less as we grow into self aware adult animals, especially as consciousness and social expectations infiltrate the mind. Although I am no longer dangling an earthworm inside my mouth, and flinching with tickled repulsion as it’s cold writhing body touches the tip of my tongue, there are plenty of other weird and wonderful aspects of being alive which I am trying to embrace and to experience. Playfulness is so underrated and so integral!

Not entirely sure whether this particular image will develop into a bigger painting, I like the idea of a crowd of these intense worm feeding and frenzied kids…..it is a potent image, I can imagine this in the style of an 80’s horror novel cover-something fantastically ridiculous. Retro horror art is amazing, especially the hyper surreal.

Storytelling: The Obsoletes

in

I read Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ and fell in love with the horrific absurdist novella. I love the intertwining of mundanity with magical, the experimenting with metaphor-the questioning of our own realities and perceptions of those realities. I always enjoy transformation stories, however fantastical on the outside, they work, I think. Whether it’s experiencing an existential crisis, a depressive meltdown, or that feeling of stagnation or detachment, there is something so effective about an insect allegory, painfully comparing ourselves to a cockroach or a fly or whatever. These small, gross insect suits which we step into and inhabit when our mind is having a hard time. I sketched out this insect boy and imagined a tale of my own:

Timelapse of concept sketch ‘Fly boy’

Music is Misery by Krüller

The Obsoletes

The boy is tired. Tired of the arbitrary components that jigsaw up his days. And the jigsaw is still so dull, too. It’s mostly negative space, but not in a purposeful way as to focus your eye on the important, colourful stuff. There was no composition. No clever tricks or colour or stuff. it’s as if so far all the pieces were anticipating the construction of something entirely dull, like say, a grey pavement. The dullest most greyest of pavements. Not even a hint of a ‘pavementy-peak-of-interest’; such as one of those albino style dog poos, all dry and brittle and white and right there in the middle of the pavement, glowing in it’s calcium-rich pride. Not even one of those. No two pieces united to reveal a scrawled obscenity, claiming a newly tarmacked oblong adorned with lime green spray can caps, lazy execution making it all the more offensive. It is….ugh, just grey. Life, he decides is one long slab of aggrieved grey.

The epiphanic episode exhausts him and he encourages a little nap during the office meeting. Under the spell of slumber he rises up at if in levitation, and, being a great rejector of supernatural claims, he peers down in awkward and hovering bewilderment, squinting through altered eyes to attempt some sort of rational explanation. Seeing and feeling a prickly black surface beneath his body, he notices that his hands are clenched tight to clumps of wire, is it wire? Both horrified and electrified by this unexpected tableau, he checks his lucidity, loudly articulating the sentence ‘Okay so now I am riding a giant fly’. And he is, he really is. The fly, as if intrinsically linked to the boy’s new commitment to the dream, (if this is a dream, he thinks he hopes it is one), changes gear. And they are off!. Intense vibrations surge through the boy, ending at his teeth, which he grits until they crumble. He realizes that he isn’t just riding this fly, he is part of it, the whole thing. Like a cheap action figure-the ones that are made in a single mould, once you chip away the paint job, which had created the illusion of ‘man on a horse’, underneath you see in fact it’s ‘man horse’ all one entity, all one lump of plastic. He doesn’t care though.. He isn’t plastic, or a man horse, but he isn’t absolutely sure what he is. I am….well….anatomically more insect he supposes……This is also the most ridiculous fantastic slab of his life pavement so far, and he doesn’t want to pick too hard at the details, because it’s what he tends to do, and it is an effective way to sabotage these fleeting moments of pavement life respite. This fly, ‘this thing’-has infiltrated the grey. He is more happy right now, anchored to this beastly fantasy, than the day in his earlier reality. Happier still than the time when they offered him this position and he thought everything mattered.

Gleefully, he kicks the side of the soaring spectre-subsequently kicking his own side, as you would after having your organic matter fused together with that of a giant fly…….A sort of ‘giddy up’. And the saucer-eyed steed darts forwards with incredible speed……so fast the boy feels sick, they land violently on a pen-chewing work colleague. The work colleague twiddles the pen, agitated. The boy vomits over the nib of the pen. Newly toothless mouth shining with saliva and stomach acid. He watches, impressed with how an appalling act like this exalts him. He is high. Higher than all the other times in the old human attempts. Overcome with purpose, fly boy sets his gaze on an indignant hole punch. Who still uses a hole punch anyway? Everything went paperless a million years ago……he smiles at how silly it all is, remembering that he still has a binder filled with empty slippery fish in the top drawer of his desk. It’s all so depressingly obsolete, I’m obsolete, he thinks. But how lucky I am to have no use for it, not then and not now in this state, now that I am fly boy. And, with less than a micro second’s hesitation, flyboy attacks an unsuspecting stapler. Fly boy was enjoying the absurdity of it all. I mean, from the outside , from the perspective of the pen chewers, he was just this persistent little critter. He was a tiny fly , sorry, fly boy, with a real hatred for office stationery. It was ludicrous when you put it like that. But it was also sort of true, in a ‘I’m not actually a fly boy’ way. That was the awful part that was bugging him………


Sphynx cat Smileys. Because.

in

Finally got working on the sphynx cats, ironing out some wrinkles. Still in the process of adding bits and pieces to the background-an alien skull filled with third eye mind goo seemed like a good starting point.

My ritual of spray can brush sketching is somewhat of a comfort thing for me. The softness of the lines means the underlying drawing is easy to smudge and manipulate. Sometimes I duplicate the sketch layer and paint over, but often these initial lines become part of it. They are my guide. I’ve adopted a habit now of doing a quick flurry of sketches and chucking in colour ideas, then I go back to a monochrome reworking; this is me putting in the ‘work’. I find it easier to focus on contrast and tone before complicating it with the more exciting stuff like colour and texture. I like to have the composition and general gist down first. I find it good practice too, really getting involved with the subject-even if that subject happens to be a hairless cat…….

In another life I was solely designing imagery for 90’s rave flyers. P.s. plastic dummies are tough to draw……I was constantly referring to reference pics, for some reason fathoming out folds of skin felt way more intuitive.

Storytelling; Furry secrets

in

A storytelling concept- I’ve included my work so far.....which is a prep sketch. No further utterings on paper just yet, simply a visual which had to be scribbled down before it fled from the fleeting ‘odd but I like it’ catalogue I have flicking through my brain all day long. There is a girl and there is a pine marten. And there is a deep secret eating away at their joint soul.....

I had become enamoured by the long body and mischievous snout of the weasel this week, and felt a real urge to draw one. In my search for references, I discovered nature’s most adorable assassin, the pine marten. The idea of something so charming, prancing about the British woodlands, the cutest frolic to lure in the naive and roaming child, rather like a piskie having fun at the expense of a drunken rambler out on a misty moor. The cat-sized creature casts a spell and the young earth cub sleeps. And then, whilst under the influence of hedgerow herbs, receives a strange and magical deposit.........I like this as a short illustrated horror story. Undecided on direction colour-wise, really enjoying muted shades, wondering about a grey/blue/sage palette or perhaps simply all in black and white.....

I’ve been trying out many ideas for short stories based on memoiresque, folk horror and fairytales. Adult picture book sort of thing.....but not as exciting as a jazz mag, unless clothed taxidermied squirrels get you all excited. I suppose these brain snippets fester in the realm of graphic novel but less graphicsy and more painted scenes of zoomorphism with some rhyming couplet streams of consciousness, or something. A bit like if you imagine Dr Seuss watched the movie Alien whilst having a cuppa with Mole from Wind in the Willows and then, without the inclusion of cancel culture material, plegmed up some art out across a page.

Somewhere in the world, a lonely mad person needs these storybooks in their life. That’s what I’m telling myself......

I’m enjoying the figuring out of concepts and the making of strange stuffs. Nowt to lose but my sanity, and that’s overrated.

Creepy sounds by me.

Flow states with Cyborg Sirens make everything better.......

in

I began to adopt a practice last year, to encourage more play and instinctive results when it comes to concepts and sketching. In moments when I’m feeling tired or overwhelmed by workload or a deadline or a project yet to be conceptualised, I found I’d freeze and get nothing done. One of my creative procrastinations surprisingly became a meditative process and I now implement it as soon as I feel the paralysis creeping up. I allow myself between half an hour and an hour to draw something. Anything. There is no expectation and it doesn’t matter what ends up on the page. I am not allowed a reference, but there are no other restrictions. Once the time is up, the image can be tossed aside if I hate it. If there’s potential for development, perhaps I’ll save it for further work. Either way, it’s’ going into my imagination, conjuring up a thing. What I find during this activity is that I enter a flow state. I often manage to get into ‘the zone’ when I’m working in a hyper focused manner, but for these imaginative studies, it’s like a super quick propelled version of that. Perhaps it’s the nostalgia of drawing for fun which is what we do when we are kiddiwinks. Perhaps it’s the abandonment of ‘real work’ which transforms the task into a forbidden fruit, making it more tantalising. But it always has interesting results and it reignites the creative flame. Occasionally it’s the very act of procrastinating that suddenly jerks my brain into action and the illustration problem I’ve spent all day unable to solve, is magnificently apparent-hanging there in the disemboweled remnants of a cyborg siren. The takeaway is, as soon as I tell myself I’m blocked creatively-I have to intervene with a new angle and a new set of rules (or in this case no rules). I made a little timelapse of this strange concept sketch which grew from an instance of frustrated ’I am crap and I have no ideas’ syndrome. The moral of the story is, turn off the thinking and let the subconscious (and in my case, disturbed) cogs of your mind fix your deadlines for you.....

Cold Blood, Sweaty Palms

in

A quick concept sketch and poem beginnings on the theme of reptilian brain syndrome which appears to be taking over the world. Nice to focus on the monochrome and good practice-colour can often take an image somewhere else, I’m thinking eventually creating a little animation of the lizard crawling up through the palm, and transforming into flashing neons or something…..For now I want to get down the textures and the shapes and enjoy the contrast.

Sketched in Procreate using the default spray can brush (medium nozzle)

Weirdo music by me, recorded and mixed in GarageBand

Cold  thoughts geyser out

From our pores

Every pause

..........underscored with

Deregulated  ambition

To protect.

It is a

Thermostat combat

Hot mammal hearts

Beat silent, confined

To the rib cages of 

The armourless.

Shedding scales

Scaling lives

Hoping all our lizards

Can regrow their losses

Once the cold war cools off.

The Giantess Gerd

in

A piece of work I ACTUALLY finished is ‘The Giantess Gerd’. And as you can see from the progress stage pics, after some initial confusion about a can of worms verses a mushroom fascinator, I created this mythical portrait of a Norse goddess. I sketched her up and eventually executed the finished painting all within Procreate. It’s the program closest to a traditional hand drawing experience that I’ve discovered so far. As a huge fan of concept sketching, the Apple pen and iPad have become the absolute default for my process.

I’m chuffed with how she turned out and I have a few more goddesses up my sleeve.....I’ve used the image to design an album cover for some of my bizarre electronic soundscapes called ‘Goldi War Locks’.


And here is a full time lapse video! Seven minutes of utter waffle....I describe my thoughts and creative process for mythical portrait painting of The Giantess Gerd, whilst attempting to tell the story of entirely pre-#metoo style antics on display from God Freyr, as he woos from afar via golden apples and a big shiny ring. This was a lot of fun to put together!

Painted in Procreate and edited using Motionleap and InShot.

Narration and sound by me.