Here's a sketch of one of my favorite writers the revered horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. I read his stuff pretty young and it really, really scared me. He taught me the pleasure in being scared, which is a useful tool in life. The Wikipedia entry is good but you really need to read his work to get it. It's totally unique, though you'll likely recognize something of his work in contemporary horror movies and books. His work is incredibly relevant and fresh seventy years after they were written. As an aside there are some amazing Lovecraft book covers by a great number of amazing artists. I recommend hunting down one with a Mignola or Palencar cover but there are plenty more great ones. However you can read all his work for free here.
I should warn you, this author changed my outlook on life. He expanded the shadows deeper and made sure I understood my mind would totally break if I could actually see what's there. He certainly makes things more interesting.
Another favorite Dungeons & Dragons monster, the Bugbear. A great gobliny beast.
It's been an interesting week for me.
Top Shelf released its new website featuring Maddy Kettle quite prominently. This led to me being featured in really cool places like
here and
here. Also, the
Spectrum award has been in the nerd news a bit too, really great week.
Work wise, I just finished a couple of pieces for the upcoming
Steampunk Reloaded anthology as well as a
tarot card for SuperPunch, which is filled with amazing artists. You can check out my card
here. I'm also contributing a sword and sorcery short story to a new pulp magazine. More on that soon. And now I've moved on to book covers before returning to comics.
I'm planning to return to
Nova Scotia for a visit in the middle of April. I'm feeling a bit home sick and I miss the ocean. Before I go there are a couple of concerts I'd like to see, anyone interested in joining me? The first is indie folk harp player
Joanna Newsom at the Pheonix in Toronto on March 13th. The second is a
pagan heavy metal show headlined by Finntroll, and that's at the Opera House in Toronto on April 12th. Drop me a line if either shows sound interesting to you.
A Valkyrie from a college ptroject on Norse mythology and folklore. Looking at this piece now i can see the direction I was going in combining drawing and painting.
This started life as an ink drawing based on one of Daniel J Miller's amazing photographs of Tibetan nomads. Yesterday I saw an artists process online(I can't remeber who the artist was).He would do a black and white painting and then add colour in Photoshop, which is what I tried here.This is an incredibly fast way to work and dos retain the mark of a human hand which I really like.
The Flobot holds the keys to other robots and computer systems. This stationary robot takes commands and passes them on to other systems, a sort of hub for artificial intelligence. Flobots are about the size of a car. They talk slowly and consider every word. They enjoy games with numbers.
When I visited Ann James, illustrator of Ready Set Skip!, at Books Illustrated, she mentioned that there’s an Australia-wide shortage of book illustrators. To help address the problem, she’s recently taught two workshops on book illustration for aboriginal artists, sponsored by Magabala Books.
Becoming a children’s book illustrator isn’t always a direct path. Ann started out as an art teacher. Gaye Chapman, illustrator of Breakfast with Buddha, had been a graphic designer and professional painter for many years when her first children’s book, Heart of the Tiger, came out in 2004. Sally Rippin, illustrator of Becoming Buddha, started out writing and illustrating picture books, first published in 1996. Her novel, Chenxi and the Foreigner, begun while she was studying Chinese painting in China years earlier, was published in 2002, and an adult version is now in process. Sally teaches writing for children at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, where Ann is now studying with an eye to writing children’s books in addition to illustrating them.
Ann James and her partner, Ann Haddon, long-time promotors of children’s book illustration as an art genre, also produced Making Pictures: Techniques for Illustrating Children’s Books. They have had an exhibition space for children’s book art at their studio/bookshop for years and have recently begun organizing traveling exhibitions of children’s book illustrations on multiple continents.
While these illustrious illustrators illustrate books, their stories illustrate the many paths that can lead to a career in children’s book illustration.
Not all spiritual books for kids are obviously so at first glance. Fiction may help children deal with spiritual questions even better when there is not direct spiritual content. A librarian friend offers three of her multicultural favorites for older kids. Crash, by Jerry Spinelli, documents the growing friendship between a Quaker boy and an agnostic jock. Samir and Yonatan by Daniella Carmi, is a Batchelder Award-winning memoir of a Palestinian childhood. In Iqbal, by Francesco D’Adamo, a fictionalized account of a Pakistani boy sold into slavery, children develop spirituality without any wholesome adult influence. (At PaperTigers, see a review of Susan Kuklan’s Iqbal Masih and the Crusaders Against Child Slavery, a non-fiction account of this tragic but inspiring story.)
Two recent Australian animal picture books are among the many endearing examples of spiritual books for young children. Breakfast with Buddha, by Vashti Farrer and Gaye Chapman, is a first-person account of an ego-filled cat’s encounter with Buddhist monks and his consequent lesson about humility. Samsara Dog, by Helen Manos, beautifully relates the story of a dog’s several lives as he develops the spiritual qualities that finally free him from the cycle of rebirth.
And a Buddhist nun friend from Taiwan highly recommends Kate Decamillo’s The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. “I read it six times,” she said with a smile, “and cried every single time.”
The deep themes of human life are everywhere, for eyes that see. Non-didactic fiction gives children a way to explore large spiritual questions without being “spoon-fed” opinions and views.
Here's a sketch of one of my favorite writers the revered horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. I read his stuff pretty young and it really, really scared me. He taught me the pleasure in being scared, which is a useful tool in life. The Wikipedia entry is good but you really need to read his work to get it. It's totally unique, though you'll likely recognize something of his work in contemporary horror movies and books. His work is incredibly relevant and fresh seventy years after they were written. As an aside there are some amazing Lovecraft book covers by a great number of amazing artists. I recommend hunting down one with a Mignola or Palencar cover but there are plenty more great ones. However you can read all his work for free here.
Wow, I really like Lovecraft´s stories and this illustration is really appropriate for him. Very dark and impressive.
I love it! :-)
I understand why he writes dark stories... Good draw.
Thanks Carmen!
Thanks Martine!
That's great. Now i want to see a full-blown creepy Lovecraft story by you.
Thanks Darryl! I'd really love to do something like that...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePelcaQOEaE
I can't understand a word of this, but I saw it and it immediately reminded me of your work :) It's a trailer for some Czech movie. Hope you enjoy!
Lovecraft is one of my absolute favourite authors. I'm 20 years old now and his stories still genuinely terrify me. It's such a rare art to possess.
This illustration does him such justice too, you should do more pieces for a full story or something :]
Thanks Erin! That's amazing! I shared it on Twitter.
Thanks Amoureux! I'd LOVE to do that.