Good evening, Hive community! After a few weeks, I’m back trying to be consistent with posting here and sharing new artwork. There’s quite the learning curve for someone that ins’t technologically savvy but I’m finding some good tutorials and YouTube videos to help understand the keys. If you know of any good walk throughs and ways to best participate on here, please leave a comment.
I was commissioned to paint a Universal Monsters skatedeck. The client asking for emphasis on Dracula and gave me free rein for the design of the board and what monsters I chose to include outside of Bela. I picked Daughter of Dracula to fill the top of the board to keep with the vampiric theme, as well as the iconic image of her eyes being a great lead-in to the rest of the board. Below Bela in his most iconic form, I chose to include The Bride, The Phantom, The Monster, The Mummy, and my personal favorite — The Creature.
This was my first dive into the digital realm, using ProCreate on the iPad to scale out my initial drawing and understand the composition of the board. What. A. Learning. Curve. I’m still trying to understand the concept of layers and the different brushes but to do sketches of my concepts and have that translate into a stencil I can either print or project onto my surfaces as a means of transferring is a total game changer! I’m so excited to continue to explore digital art and utilize it to produce other products.
Once I finished the layout and the transfer of the digital art, I was able to get back into my comfort zone. I made a trip to Michael’s to pick up a few acrylic colors I was out of and over the following two weeks, I began filling in the line art with tones and values in black and white [….I kind of has to be since we’re doing silver screen classics, right?]. As I’m writing this, I’m about 80% finished. It’s going to feel so good to wrap this up and send it to my client that’s been very patient. It’s turning out to be one of my favorite pieces I’ve done.
From here, I’m going to try and find a way to have it photographed so that I can make digital reproductions of the individual monsters for sticker and shirt designs in the future. I work closely with a horror retailer in Phoenix called Terror Trader and a design like this would do so well there. That’s it for now. I’ll be back soon with a progress update and hopefully it’ll be finished! Bye for now!