Tuesday 31 October 2017

INKTOBER WEEK #4


Day 24 - I'm calling this one "Granny Smith" 



Day 25 - "Before the Storm"

"Something clambered up from the dark - a bloated blanched oval supported on myriad fleshless legs. Eyes formed in the gelatinous oval and stared at him. And he prostrated himself as he had been told, and called the horror's name - Eihort - and under the arched roof amid the nighted tunnels, the bargain was sealed"
from Before the Storm by Ramsey Campbell



Day 26 - "The Red Lodge"
"I saw something slip through the door. It was green, thin and tall. It seemed to glance back at me, and what should have been its face was a patch of soused slime..."
from The Red Lodge by HR Wakefield



Day 27 - "The Headless Horseman"
"When the spooks have a midnight jamboree
They break it up with fiendish glee
The ghosts are bad but the one that's cursed
Is the headless horseman; he's the worst
That's right, he's a fright on Halloween night!"



Day 28 - "The Return of Grimsdyke"
Peter Cushing in Tales From the Crypt 1972



Day 29 - "The Phantom of the Opera"
"He is extraordinarily thin and his dress-coat hangs on a skeleton frame. His eyes are so deep that you can hardly see the fixed pupils. You just see two big black holes, as in a dead man's skull. His skin, which is stretched across his bones like a drumhead, is not white, but a nasty yellow. His nose is so little worth talking about that you can't see it side-face; and the absence of that nose is a horrible thing to look at..."
from  Le Fantôme de l'Opéra by Gaston Leroux



Day 30 - "Prince of Darkness"
Sir Christopher Lee as Dracula


Day 31 - "Portrait of the Artist as a Spooky Man"

And that dear friends brings us to the end of #inktober! This was the first year I actually got it together to give it a shot, and I've had immense fun doing it. For anyone who wants to sharpen their artistic skills or, as it was in my case, revive some long dormant ones, I can highly recommend the simple exercise of doing a sketch a day. It's also a great way to experiment - I had alot of fun trying out some different styles, and while not all of them quite worked, I'm still quite pleased with the results. Certainly I shall be continuing my sketching endeavours into the future from now on! 

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bloody good sketches, Jim, especially the Grimsdyke. I had hoped there would be a Christopher Lee Dracula in there somewhere, I've always wanted a similar charcoal to the one in Van Helsings study in AD:1972, ideally the frame would play that haunting string refrain automatically whenever one stopped to look at it.
The only charcoal I have of him at present is from the original '58 film. I do have a life mask of the great man though, which I treasure greatly.
ST.CLAIRE

Anonymous said...

Who's that at Day 30 then St.Claire? Archbishop Desmond Tutu?
Amatyur.

Anonymous said...

Yes. I am aware of whom the day 30 sketch was of. My apologies for not including further exposition enough for you to understand. You probably thought it was Dickie Owen.
Magnanimously yours,
ST.CLAIRE

Jim Moon said...

I must confess I have long coveted that sketch in Van Helsing's study too, and it was in part the inspiration for the white on black styled sketches what I doned :)