Inktober 2018 - Week 5

Day 29 - "Double" - Well obviously the first thing that sprang to mind was a symmetrical ectoplasmic entity caught in an etheric howlaround... Well, that was the first thing that sprang to my mind...

Day 30 - "Jolt" - I wasn't sure what to do for this word, but than a flash of inspiration hit me like a bolt from the blue!

Day 31 - "Slice" - Who better for "slice" than the original slasher himself? After all, tonight it is the night he came home...

Week 1 is here
Week 2 is here
Week 3 is here
Week 4 is here

Inktober 2018 - Week 4

Day 22 - "Expensive" - another tricky prompt word... so I did a silly one as it was a Monday...

Day 23 - "Muddy" - This prompt word I took as a style cue, and hence captured this entity that appeared the other evening in my scrying glass...

Day 24 - "Chop" -  I went for one of the great chops in horror cinema - Peter Cushing's beheading of Ingrid Pitt at the finale of Hammer's The Vampire Lovers

Day 25 - "Prickly" -  After assorted monsters, violence and weirdness, I thought it was time for a nice picture, so here's a little hedgehog!

Day 26 - "Stretch" - After some consideration, and wanting to avoid joining the inevitable flood of Reed Richards/Plastic Man/Armstrong pics, I went for a portrait of one of Britain's most notorious criminals, who did many a stretch in stir...

Day 27 - "Thunder" -  for this one, I went for a genuine Thor's hammer amulet found in Skåne, Sweden

Day 28 - "Gift" - for this one I decided to do the original girl with all the gifts - Carrie White

Week 1 is here
Week 2 is here
Week 3 is here

Inktober 2018 - Week 3

Day 15 - "Weak" -  a quick and silly one today... Hey, it was a Monday and we all need a chuckle on Monday morning, right, gang?

Day 16 - "Angular" - This reminded me of the classic weird tale The Hounds of Tindalos by Frank Belknap Long

"They are beyond good and evil as we know it. They are that which in the beginning fell away from cleanliness. Through the deed they became bodies of death, receptacles of all foulness. But they are not evil in our sense because in the spheres through which they move there is no thought, no morals, no right or wrong as we understand it. There is merely the pure and the foul. The foul expresses itself through angles..."

You can hear my reading of it here

Day 17 - "Swollen" - This prompt made me thing of another Mythos entity, Tsathoggua, created by Clark Ashton Smith. This sketch is from a Hyperborean statue carved by Smith himself of the fat, sleepy bat-toad god.

Day 18 - "Bottle" -  Fancy a djinn and tonic?

Day 19 - "Scorched" - At this time of year, I couldn't help thinking of the fate of many a guy...

Day 20 - "Breakable" - This put me in mind of breaking curses, which in turn leads me to Casting the Runes by MR James...

Day 21 - "Drain" -  Well, in an attempt to avoid doing the inevitable Pennywise picture, I considered "drain" as a verb, which led me to vampires, and therefore provided the perfect excuse to draw Ingrid Pitt...

Week 1 is here

Week 2 is here

Inktober 2018 - Week 2

Day 8 "Star" - Having just been reading about the old rogue recently in Stephen Volk's excellent new book The Dark Masters Trilogy (see here for details), I was reminded of one of Aleister Crowley's magickal laws "Every Man and Woman is a Star"

Day 9 "Precious" - I think this one speaks for itself!

Day 10 "Flowing" - This one was inspired by Tolkien's own wonderful illustrations, chiefly his cover for the original edition of The Hobbit

Day 11 "Cruel" - "Oh, he was a cruel child for certain, but he had to pay in the end, and after.’ ‘After?’ said Uncle Oldys, with a frown. ‘Oh yes, Doctor, night after night in old Mr. Simpkins’s time, and his son, that’s our Mr. Simpkins’s father, yes, and our own Mr. Simpkins too. Up against that same window, particular when they’ve had a fire of a chilly evening, with his face right on the panes, and his hands fluttering out, and his mouth open and shut, open and shut, for a minute or more, and then gone off in the dark yard..."

from The Residence at Whitminster by MR James

. Day 12 "Whale" - and with me being me, I had to add "in spaaaaaaaaaaaace!" If any of you hoopy froods know where your towel is, then you'll guess the inspiration for this one...

Day 13 "Guarded" - A misspent youth devouring Fighting Fantasy gamebooks suggested this one... See the little goblin, see his little feet..."

Day 14 "Clock" - very much inspired by Ionicus book covers

The round-up of the first week's drawing can be found here!

Inktober 2018 - Week 1

Well, it's that time of the year once again, so here are my collected scribbles for #inktober! This year, I thought it would be fun challenge to produce drawings every day using the official list of prompt words pictured above. And so far, it's working out rather well! Whether I stick with it, remains to be seen... Tune in next week to find out! Anyway, here's the first week's results! 

Day 1 - "Poisonous" - fairly straight-forward this one!

DAY 2 - "Tranquil" - This is my Mum's dear old little dog Penny, who went to her permanent rest aged 17 not long ago 

DAY 3 - "Roasted" - I went for something with an old school RPG vibe for this one! 

DAY 4 "Spell" - I stuck with the white on back and D&D flavours for this one too

Day 5 - "Chicken" - Toughest word so far... And I couldn't bring myself to do some doodle of an ordinary fowl so went for intergalactic space-bastard, the cyborg kaiju Gigan... who looks a little bit like a chicken...

Day 6 "Drooling" - I stuck with the big monsters vibe, and created this chap who may be a distant relation of 2000 AD's Satanus!

Day 7 "Exhausted" - Another tough one, but I thought I'd even up the odds with this one...

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! 

INKTOBER WEEK #3

Day 16  - "Uninvited Guests" - another homage to old school RPG art

Day 17 - Crooked House with Mark Gatiss as the Curator

Day 18 - I think I'm calling this one "Black Goat Kaleidoscope"

Day 19 - Ghastly McNasty, Editor at Large #inktober2017

Day 20 - A regular face at the Great Library of Dreams...

Day 21 - Misty

Day 22 - another piece inspired by MR James
"One thing I did notice in the carving on the well-head, which I think must have escaped you. It was a horrid, grotesque shape — perhaps more like a toad than anything else, and there was a label by it inscribed with the two words, “Depositum custodi” - "Keep that which is committed to thee"...

from The Treasure of Abbot Thomas

Day 23 - The Stain of Vampirism - this piece was very much an exercise in seeing what suggested itself from some random splashes.