Bluebeard

A quick take on a Bluebeard, the old French tale of a young maiden who marries an ugly nobleman with an even uglier secret. Classified as a fairy tale but quite frankly a forerunner of the horror story (it makes even the darkest versions of Little Red Riding Hood and Snow White look about as scary as The Very Hungry Caterpillar), I hope to have captured the grim nature of the yarn.

Der Teufel

A little something I did in gouache. I always worry that my painting style seems like a knock-off of Mary Blair. Suffice to say, I doubt Mary Blair would create something like this demon...

Jimmy, or The Façade

Happy Thursday to You...

Happy Thursday to You, as a naive French school child once sang thinking he was going to pass his English test for singing an English song correctly. Either way, I'm back after one of my ridiculously long pauses.

This is a bizarre, rather shoddy, and ultimately twisted sketch with some pencils I did on a train to Saintes (a French town around an hour or so north of Bordeaux, famous for its various numerous Roman ruins, including a stunning amphitheatre), depicting somewhat inappropriate and cruel minded gift-card designs. I swear that they're all in jest, and that I would never have enough negative energy to send out such deranged gift cards out. If you really pissed me off, you simply wouldn't even get a card in the first place!

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

In the darkest depths of a very cold British winter, unnerved by the night arrived just after 4pm, shrouding a below-freezing and snowy landscape in black, out came a delightful fellow from my warped mind:

This creepy creature was created with gouache, with a Faber Castell PITT pen providing the teeth. After having scanned this image into the computer, I did some minor touching up (the removal of a few pencil marks, as well as the addition of a pupil). Oh, and did I mention that I did this on Christmas Eve?

Yikes! It's the Fish Wife!

This is another one that I did quite a while ago, when I still had access to a scanner. I understand that some could interpret this image as misogynistic, but it's meant nothing more than a bit of daft fun. I recently heard the term "fishwife"; it originally meant a woman who sold fish at markets, but ultimately became a derogatory term for any coarse, shrewish woman of low background. When I heard the term, however, I couldn't help but think of an image similar to this, a sort of female version of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

In fact, the whole image sums up my dislike of fish. It's not a fear, it's just that I find a lot of specific types to be quite ugly. Thus, the perfect inspiration for a creation apt for a horror/sci-fi B-movie, and a perfect thing to display in the run-up to Halloween!