Dealing with the Zombie Menace

"If you're NOT a flesh-eating thrall of undeath... Grunt ONCE."

Click on image for full size.

Just in time for Halloween, here's a painting I sketched up a few months ago.

I'm not quite the zombie fanatic that some of my friends are, but they have certainly inspired some fascinating work (early George Romero and the oeuvre of Max Brooks to name just two), the best of which are fun mirrors into our own society's fears. Perhaps not surprisingly, they usually suggest that those in our society mostly fear each other.

When I set out to make a zombie image, what interested me wasn't the zombie itself, but how it is manifested as a plague to be controlled. I tried to draw upon the dread that I felt when I saw photos in 2010 of Tsunami relief efforts in Nuclear-Disaster-stricken Fukushima prefecture, the mint-colored HAZMAT suits had a chilling unreality to them.

It reminded me that the color palette of most real disasters is the antiseptic tones of the equipment and clothing draping those responding to it.

New Writing Blog!

In an effort to keep the focus of this particular blog on visual work, I have decided to clutter the internet further with another blog, this one devoted to written work.

I am adding a link to the new blog to the sidebar on the right of this page, and additionally you can find it by clicking on this link, which will also take you to its inaugural offering: a short story that's been cooking in my brain for a little while.

Look to the sky! It's digital work masquerading as brushwork on scrolls!

To accompany this story, and something which I think ought to be a habit of mine from now on, I decided to make companion illustrations as headings. Half of the story is set in China in 1006 A.D., so I decided to try my hand at an imitation period Chinese painting, even though I opted to imitate the Yuan Dynasty's style, which came about 200 years after this story is set (1006 A.D. would have been the Song Dynasty, but paintings of that period tend towards monumental complexity and I chickened out)


The Chinese text at the top-right corner is Ke Xing 客星 — literally "Guest Star" — a name given by Chinese astronomers of antiquity to temporary or unexpected events observed in the heavens, a phenomenon that factors into the story on the other blog. Hopefully I didn't utterly butcher the rendering of the text, or generate a pastiche image of culturally inept banality (I always hope that part, though.)

The Zoo!

I don't need to tell people that the Zoo is fun, or that it's a great opportunity to sketch some really interesting things that almost all of us can't possibly encounter on a routine basis. Drawing animals is tough, very tough. Trying to figure out their skeletal and muscular structure, their balance, the way they move, all while hopefully imparting character... All very challenging.

That's probably why the sketches I'm most happy with happen to depict the most human-like creature of the lot, Gorillas.

 

Inkling!

I just recieved a belated Christmas gift today, the Wacom Inkling, a little device that you attach to the side of whatever you're sketching on, and it records all of your pen strokes as vectors, negating the need to scan anything while preserving the act of drawing with an actual pen on actual paper.

Wacom Inkling

I've just finished charging it and had to give it a spin, so here's the inaugural sketch on my Inkling, drawn on an A5 Moleskine sketchbook, of a Rob Gronkowski ball-spike in honor of last night's Patriots NFL win.

Gronk Smash!

As usual, I'm going to end with a promise to be more active in my posting. It's pretty bad of me not to keep updating regularly, so pretty soon I'm going to scan in the sketches I did of a recent trip to the zoo. Everyone likes animals, right?