Merry...Happy....Holiday Something:360 sphere art experiment

Hello, Ducks! I haven't posted in a while- but I've actually been drawing a lot of monsters, so I should probably change that. Anyway, yesterday I tried something out with the new 360 sphere photos I can create using the Google Streetview app, and to my delight: it worked! It's kind of rushed, because I just wanted to see if it would work. I can't upload directly to Blogger, because- at least, as far as I know- it doesn't yet support 360 photos. This is best viewed on a mobile device- dragging with the mouse on laptop or desktop doesn't look so great. The link will take you to the image on my Facebook profile- it's a public image, so I don't think you need to be logged in or anything.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10157879846390361&set=a.10150835364130361.732325.664810360&type=3

and here is a sample from the 360 photo:

Wrestlenomicon

Hello, Ducks! Been working on a pretty big project for me- maybe not in scope, but in quantity of work needed. It's a wrestling card game involving creatures from the Lovecraft mythos, oddly enough. It's fun working on, but I need to do 120 card illustrations (less than halfway done with that) in addition to cover art and card design, which I've already completed. The first two decks are for Cthulhu and Hastur. I don't know much about these types of card games, but I gather that each player gets one deck and then they challenge each other card to card.  Anyway, here are some of the illustrations, which are intended to be comical.

   "Organ Donation." I think they actually expected more comic book-like artwork, so I kind of overdid it style-wise. I'm allowed to use pretty simple backgrounds, though. I'm not sure that the gutted creature in the background reads so well, but I guess it's okay if people notice that only upon closer inspection.

"Nuke to the Ass." There's a lot of butt-related humor involved in these cards. 

   "Glomp Stomp." For some drawings that involved cities, I used cities from all over the world, to show that Cthulhu was an equal opportunity demolisher. I'm still not good at making monsters look huge, so I need to work on that. Just desaturating the color and making them look faded (in this case, more blue) in the distance doesn't seem to do the trick, but it will have to do for now.

 Oh! And Fufu- I heard that my brother, Paul, got to meet you at the Cthulhu thing in Portland! That's great!

 Hi, everyone! Happy new year and all that. I had a gallery show in NYC back in October- my first as a headliner. It went really well and I sold a lot of pieces. I also learned how to mount and frame work- never had to do that before. Anyway, this drawing is a new piece. It didn't come out at all like I first envisioned. I think the colors are too bland and it's all generally faded looking- and a background might have been nice. I had originally thought of this creature that looked as if it were covered with black mud, with vines and wild flowers growing all over it. It only ended up being some sort of tree monster with root legs because I doodled out the pencil line and then realized, as I got to the bottom, that I was running out of room and hadn't even thought of the legs. Yeah, I could have started over, but I thought I'd do "this version" and then go and do another. Someday.

 This was a sketch for another drawing that I still haven't worked out. Again, there are so many things about this drawing that miss the mark I was going for by a mile. I tend to see that a sketch is deviating, but then I continue it, just in case it goes somewhere good- even though I know it won't end up being used for the original concept. 

More Freelance Monsters

Been getting tons of work lately, so this 100% freelance may work out after all. I really hope it does, because I truly enjoy doing it. Anyway, here are a couple projects I'm working on.

From top to bottom: Ghouls, A Troll, Princess of Stones, King of Miseries.
The first two are for the RPG Burning Wheel. These are just the scanned in pencils with some Photoshop work. The finals will be ink drawings, a la The Monster Manual. Ghouls are corpse eating creatures, so it seems like they should have powerful digging claws and be covered with filth. I probably need to make them less zombie-like. As for the troll, I somewhat followed the TSR design. The limbs should be longer, with bigger hands.
The second two are two of seven demonic tarot cards I did for the short film, Interpreter of Signs, being directed by Academy Award-winning make up effects artist, Tom Woodruff Jr.

A Son of Kyuss

  This is a drawing from my sketchbook that, until today, I had only posted on Facebook, I think. It's not much, but it certainly exposed me to a lot of really disgusting maggot-embedded reference material. One video, in particular. I know about the Sons of Kyuss from the Fiend Folio. As far as I know, and I could be wrong, they were made up for that book, or they were in a previous D & D campaign and were therefore included. As I recall, they attacked you in hordes (something creepy about masses of undead children rushing towards you) and the maggots could leap from their heads and eye sockets at you.

Hi, everyone! Sorry, I've been silent for a while. I got laid off from work, so now I'm 100% freelance. Going to see how this works out. I'm certainly much happier without having to commute to New York City every day. Anyway, two things. First, is a drawing I made last night of an industrious Elder One :

Second, I went to Sandy Hook the other day and stumbled across something terrible, so I filmed it and made a little movie. I wouldn't normally post videos here, but I think it's somewhat appropriate. 

Monster Childhood Revisited

Hello, all! Lately, I've gotten back into recreating some old drawings that I did as a child. On the left, a drawing from 1974 of a horned monster attacking two buildings, some army men, and....a dump truck, a bulldozer, and a cement mixer. I'm pretty sure that the horned monster was my take on Gomora, from Ultraman. Anyway, on the right is a version I did today. Because of the strange inconsistencies in scale and perspective in the original, I had considered doing this piece as a medeival illumination or Dürer woodcut.

Macro!

Hey, everyone! I've been busy with my new Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro lens. Sure, this isn't about monster drawings, but some of our crawly friends certainly do look monstrous when viewed up close. For example:

   From top to bottom: The Black Ground Beetle(very common in New Jersey), a Stink Bug, a plump grub, and "Polydesmus angustus," the flat-backed millipede. These will all certainly be helpful and influential in my future monster drawings. I have a whole bunch of macro photos on my Flickr page, and this is only after owning the lens for about 3 weeks. I can't wait until the summer brings the REAL specimens. Yup, beetle and caterpillar season is almost upon us!

  

Nucklavee, In Work

Hello, everyone! Really seeing some nice work all around, and I'm very proud to be in such great company. My introduction to Eaten By Ducks was through Robert Adam Gilmour, who had seen a drawing I had done on Agony a Go-Go (picture on left). Somehow, I had forgotten the source of the creature. I looked through all of my mythology and folklore texts, as well as my notes, and couldn't find a thing on it. I put it up in my gallery, along with the caption that should anyone be able to identify it, they should email me. Well, Robert emailed me and said that the man-horse creature was known as the Nucklavee and then invited me to join EBD. At least, that's how I remember it. 

 Anyway, I've always hated this drawing. What you're seeing is actually a xerox of the original sketch that I clumsily colored with marker. It's not even cropped off right- you can see the edges of the sketchbook page it was taped into. So, I've started on a newer version. It's not done yet, and I'm not happy with what I have so far. I started with some sketches of sickly horses(ignoring versions of the creature that involved huge flipper legs and flipper appendages protruding from the chest of the horse):

 Even if I wasn't drawing a Nucklavee, it's always good to have some nice sickly horse studies. I'm positive that the description of the Nucklavee I had seen had said that the monster was comprised of a rotting horse with the rotting torso of a man , his head huge and his arms long enough to reach the ground, sticking out of its back.

  So, anyway, I started off with this drawing, but I made the original pencil line too dark- which is a bad thing for me. You see, when I go to ink it with a fine line, and the pencil line is so dark, I can't see the ink line very well, so what looks okay when you first think you're done looks like crap after you've erased the pencil line. You what I got was this ugly, disjointed bit of line work with bad hatching. I hate the neck, especially. So, anyway, I started another version, this time adhering closer to the descriptions that I'm reading all over the web on the Nucklavee, wherein the horse and "rider" are comprised mainly of exposed muscle covered with pulsing veins.

   It's an okay start, but I think my horse looks too much like a young horse or pony because of the proportions I've given it. So dainty. I think I'll go for a rotting musculature look, as opposed to the shiny wet look I've seen.

   Finally, I made a quick sketch of another idea, where the features of the Nucklavee are more exaggerated, like the horses in the paintings of Breugel the Elder. Even more so, than in this sketch. I'll let you guys know when I've finished anything.

My Penanggalan Obsession

 Ever since seeing it in the D & D Fiend Folio, I've been a bit obsessed with the Penanggalan, a female vampire from Malaysian folklore. A good part of Agony a Go-Go was dedicated to the Penanggalan, and was, I think, one of the primary reasons people found my site, back in 1997. I noticed that my images or writings on the Penanggalan appeared on several mythology and folklore websites, including some academic sites, at the time. Not sure if I was providing a helpful service, since I had greatly embellished on the mythology.

   There's just something so odd and demented about the Penanggalan. There was a similar monster in European folklore which consisted of a wizard, whose head and entrails separated from his body and floated around performing unsound deeds. The Penanggalan's purpose is pretty straight forward: it eats babies and small children. 

   It's preferred method of attack was to come up through the floorboards. I'm not sure if the original folktale involved her forcing her way up through the floor as we see here- perhaps she had some more discreet method that Southeast Asian architecture allowed- but I liked the idea of this disgusting thing blossoming out of the floor.

   Apparently, you could protect your home from the Penanggalan by having the Jeruju thistle growing around it's perimeter. The Penanggalan would become ensnared in its barbs and be trapped until morning, where she would be vulnerable to attack. The Penanggalan uses her long hair and innards as tentacles.

   Anyway, I have a whole bunch of drawings of Penanggalans, some of which I've posted to my Flickr page. The last thing I'll post here, before being rude and going on too long, is a sampling of just how demented my little obsession was: two pages of notes from a sketchbook, back in 1993:

First Steps

Hello, my name is Kurt Komoda. I've been lurking on here for a while. I'm an artist living in New Jersey and working as a commercial artist in New York City- though, it doesn't really pay the rent and bills. I think you all know the story. Like many of you, I grew up as a terrified child, tormented by the things in the dark or just outside my field of view. Most of my nightly phantoms were fueled by the snippets of horror movies I was able to see before my parents would send me off to bed. Unfortunately, they always did this just as the nice movie we were watching turned into something ghastly- so....I be sent upstairs to my room where my imagination would begin to fill in the blanks. In all cases that I've have the chance to check, "my version" was better than the actual movie. I've learned that it sometimes better to keep it that way. My introduction to Eaten By Ducks was through Robert Gilmour, when he identified one of the drawings I had done of the Nucklavee: I had read about it somewhere and immediately sketched it, but then forgot what the hell it was. I don't think it's a very good drawing. It was just a silly sketch that, for some reason, I Xeroxed and then colored with marker and white gouache. I hate the human head and the one-eyed horse looks like "My Little Pony" or something. I'll have to draw it again and make it look a bit more sinister. Okay, well, I can't take up too much space. I suppose there will be more as we go on. Obviously, I'm fascinated by monsters- but I draw other things, too.