The Cornish Litany Commission

Here is a litany (prayer, invocation) you have probably heard, though perhaps not by name, that asks for protection against what gramps from The Pumpkin Dream might term as a woeful host of haints and witches. And the litany goes:

From Ghoulies and Ghosties
and Long-leggety Beasties
and All Things that go Bump in the Night,
Good Lord deliver us!

Words like that are perfect fodder for imaginative sorts to conjure up all sorts of hideous beasts lurking in the darkness... And Debra Meister (www.debrameister.com) has collected a good number of these postcard visions in her book  A Litany... Cornish and Otherwise. Here are two such examples of vintage cards Debra shared on the website lotsofcards.com:

The book is also a showcase for newer works by such artists (to name a few) as Chuck E. Bloom, Rick Geary, Matthew Kirscht, Chad Savage, as well the author herself. And the author says the third edition (coming next year) will offer even more artists including Ian Miller.

That's amazing company, and I'm thrilled to have been commissioned to create a postcard (or two) for that next edition! As someone who was scolded in my early years for drawing monsters, it is so much fun, as an adult, to return to a project where monsters are actually the subject of concern.  I have completed one work thus far, in a somewhat similar style to the art of The Pumpkin Dream... and have already set my sights now on completing a second work more in line with my surrealist drawings (seen here in monochrome and color).

In the meantime, Debra Meister is offering a full preview of the second edition available on blurb -- until the 3rd edition (preview here updated 1-16-2012) appears, brimming with even more ghoulies and ghosties...! Good Lord Deliver Us all! 

A Brief History of The Pumpkin Dream (Part 5) - Monsters from the Id

A continuation from A Brief History of The Pumpkin Dream (Part 4)

So after realizing that Adobe products were going to be out of my reach (without the dream possibility of upgrading toward a full suite in inexpensive increments), I decided to look around further, and this was actually very informative. It got me to consider my next trial download which was Corel Painter 11 which is great fun with the Wacom tablet!

With Corel Draw you can get very expressive, because there are a huge number of pen and brush styles that combine fantastically with the pressure sensitivity of the tablet. Whereas Illustrator seemed more exacting and strict, Corel Draw was great for free-form expression. Without trying to recreate any of my sketches just yet, I just doodled around with the settings of the charcoal and pens to create this bit of weirdness:

This, I admit, took me on a bit of tangent, exploring how sculptural I could get with the sensitivity and shading. And continuing with my doodles, created this bit of alien-esque fantasy. (Having no anatomical guidance or backdrop for the first, I realize it's a bit off, so I took the first into Photoshop and just played with a bit of mirroring on the latter two)... 

I really hope to explore this program more in future, but my end goal was to create a total of 37 illustrations, and quickly. I didn't see how I could do that with this program... And, honestly, I just didn't have a big budget, so when someone finally suggested freeware - I skeptically decided I might as well take the time to investigate the options... and that was when I found a good link that lists these: 15 freeware graphic programs.

I decided to download InkScape, which seemed more inline with my vector needs, to create simply-designed, repeatable graphic characters that I could tweak from one image to the next.

I'll continue that story in Part 6.