Cartoon Graveyard

I don’t believe it’s a secret that I’m a tad obsessed with monsters and other spooky things. To me, Hallowe’en is the second most wonderful time of the year. For this reason, I was thrilled – yes, in a dancing zombie kind of way – when Carol asked me to set up a flyer to advertise the Hallowe’en specials and events at L. A. Mood this past October. I started off with my take on a couple of classic monsters:

This was my first time painting with acrylic on watercolour paper. I was very happy with the vibrancy of the colours, particularly the green of Frankenstein’s monster, though blending was a little tricky compared to working with watercolour. I’m pleased that some of the graphite is still visible in the final work, and I think the fact that I did not outline the forms in India ink made the piece stronger.

I ran into some software issues. . . the process of digitally removing the white surrounding the figures took far longer than I expected. Here’s the next stage of the image with the background I set up in CorelDRAW:

I think the contrast of the traditionally-rendered figures with the vector-drawing landscape is quite effective.

The last step was typesetting the information for the sale. At this point I realized I probably should have blocked out the text before getting so carried away by the illustration. Fortunately, everything fit together in the end:

And oh yeah, there was a little painting of a black cat too:

As an aside, given the title of this post, it’s impossible for me not to remark on January 8th’s exciting news that David Bowie will be releasing his first studio album since 2003’s Reality. The Next Day is due out on March 8th. The first single, Where Do We Go From Here, was released last Tuesday and is available for download on iTunes. Welcome back, David! www.davidbowie.com