Speeding up the process.

As I've been producing more and more of these monster pictures I have been learning new ways to make them look good but also make the process faster. I started off with the usual proceedings of drawing a monster on the photo digitally, then drawing it out properly on paper to be scanned back in and painted over. However I found that even though it looked nice, traditional style painting in photoshop was very time consuming and it was taking me ages to get a texture that I was pleased with.
Here is one of my monsters with painted texture:

I decided to see if there was another way I could get a nice texture without it taking so long. I started to play around with painted colours on watercolour paper and then scan them into photoshop:

I then brought a texture square into a picture I was working on in photoshop and overlaid it on top of a layer that contained the shape of my monster, cut it out to fit the shape using the magic wand tool and then I just lowered the opacity so that it blended with the colour of the shape underneath:

I could then still add shadow and highlights on top and the monsters started to look a lot rougher and monster like. The final result ended up looking a lot like this:

I will continue to experiment with different textures, using anything I can find and rubbing it on paper and playing with it in photoshop. I think the way to go with this is to just be rougher and quicker with these pictures, sticking to bold shapes and simple staging.

Getting Better

As I have been creating more and more pictures in Photoshop, playing around and experimenting, I am becoming more confident. I had the idea of placing a giant sea monster in the water surrounding the Harbourside area. I was worried at first however that I wouldn't be able to make it look like it fit in with the environment in the picture and I had never really painted reflections before. But with a few filters and brush strokes in Photoshop it started to look a lot better and I was happy with the result.

The Count!

Planning on making a set of these ink on watercolour paper illustrations of monsters to maybe enlarge and put on display. This is the Count!

ZOMBIES!

I have been recently calling upon imagery from classic zombie b-movies to inspire my project. There is something about the bold reds and contrast in these films that has such character and impact. Not only do I want to incorporate a lot of the colour palette into my work but also reference the posing and staging of the monsters and people in this imagery. I collected these images from my book; 'An Encyclopaedia of Zombie Cinema' and from watching old Lucio Fulci flicks.

The Story...

I have been pondering over different ideas for the narrative of my book and after thinking of countless movie like ideas and different scenes etc. I decided that trying to recreate a film within a book isn't very readable or simple.


So I have decided to go with something ultra simple that flows across the pages quite well, here are some rough sketches to show the start of the story:

Page 1 - POV shot of boy tuning in to his "MONSTER MOVIE HOUR" show on TV.

The T.V starts to bug out and malfunction causing radioactive waves to shoot out towards the boy and suck him into the movie inside the T.V.

From here on out you see the warped boy floating across the pages through various horror movie scenes, narrowly escaping death.

I haven't thought of the specifics or an ending yet but its a start!

MONSTERS!

I have spent a lot of my time doing what I love doing and sketching monsters! I focused mainly on the classic B-movie monsters such as the Wolfman and Dracula etc. and tried to sketch them in many different ways. I'm still not yet happy with the style in most of these. I need to simplify them!

Horror Fonts & Poster Designs

These are some horror style font designs and poster designs I made earlier on in the project. I enjoyed experimenting with my own font designs for made up horror films but also trying to recreate design work for films that already exist. However I felt as though they lacked purpose.