Behemoth Stumbles

 And then I started this. 

 I've decided to try working a lot larger than I'm accustomed.  I feel like I've got my ink method down well enough that I can risk branching out.  I started with an 18x24" panel, because I had one lying around.  I'd wanted to show some kind of deer-riding savage for awhile, and working on a giant panel seemed a good a time as any.

These are all just process shots I took to keep track of the thing for posterity.  I won't bother pointing out the glaring defects that I see.  Over all, I enjoyed it quite a bit.  I found it somewhat odd that despite the fact that this is at least 6 times larger than any surface I've tried working on in the past, I was immediately out of space.

 I had initially wanted to show a whole pack of things running from this guy, but there wasn't really room.  Just as well, the action is clear.

 Partially skeletal deer have rapidly become an old standby for me.

Space constraints led to a lack of any foreground trees.  All of these pictures are terrible, but the background trees turned out alright.  I'm using a house-painting brush for a lot of this, so it's fairly ham-fisted.  Even still I was able to get a little bit of texture on them.

All aglow with spectral powers, as per usual.

And a final wash of diluted ink, and some more trees for good measure.  All in all, I like the result.  I've got another 5 slightly smaller panels I'm going to start working on today, if this fever abates.  As of now, I feel like crawling under something and shuffling off this mortal coil.  I'm a lot sicker than I presumed when I left the house today.  I've spent the last few hours sitting on a couch nodding between fever delirium and coughing fits.  There is a sign for free ice cream posted on the door here, and outside it lined up with the bottom of the "massage" parlor signage across the street in such a way as to make me think, "when did that cat house start giving away ice cream?"  I looked at this conglomeration for an uneasy 5 minutes before realizing my error.  Good work, super brain.  I'm going back to the couch now for the last hour and a half of my shift.  I hope no one wakes up early.

Leviathan Shrugs

Instead of languishing in uncertain motivation and inspiration, I've decided to keep this up for as long as the drive lasts. But first, the last-


This is number thirty-six, the last page of the book I put the original group in. If you look closely at the tree, excluding from view the serpentine beast around it, it looks like a halmark card. I'd like to do more with this idea, and I may.


I did a couple of small experiments as a run-up to this modified method. I'm using a few different kinds of ink to get the tree effects, and washes for backgrounds. I'm still getting this method down, here the background is a little on the lustrous side for my taste.


I used oil pastel as a masking agent for the halos.  I like the effect.  More things like this in the works.


Ahhh, yes.  So this began as something very different indeed.  A slightly ruined house with a tree growing out of it.  The Green ink I'm using here, being acrylic based, got away from me a bit and I ruined it in a most expert fashion.  Luckily, india ink as black as inght and will cover up anything, so taking advantage of the one blank spot and what was recoverable from the previous attempt (the bricks and the branch) I came out with this.  This also made me think about caves, which are awesome with potential.


One of my initial two experiments featured this bearded old mendicant.  I revisited him on a larger sheet here.

So that's where I stand.  More in the works.  The grim stretch of my personal doings looked up for a minute.  But Leviathan shrugs and cities fall and the petty hopes I let myself foster snuff out.  How trite.  How predictable.  It's my own fault.  I've made a hale and hearty tradition out of investing myself in a crumbling edifice.  I've also built a strong faculty of walking the fuck out.  But what the fuck do I care.  No one gets out alive.

And evil days indeed upon us.

Ahhhh, activity. Lots of that lately. Strap in, this is a long one. I'm dangerously bored and feel like writing.

I've got this thing sussed out. I'm going to get an album to put these in tomorrow, I plan on sticking them in with photo corners and pasting blocks of written text underneath. It'll be broken into 5 chapters; an introduction/wildlife survey, a chapter on the hunter and how a human lives in this place, a look at the stones, the tribes, and the troglodytes (including where they come from and a bit about how they live without dying all the time), a short account of a war between the two, and a final chapter on some of the more outlandish sights in the wood. I'm hoping to depict a slow descent into madness. I plan on calling it "This Forest is Full of Ghosts: An Account and Survey of the Northern Forests by Author Unknown (presumed deceased)" Should be fun.


This was a first attempt at depicting more of these trees than just their trunks. Worked out alright, I suppose. I also tried to vary the shade slightly between face, beard and hat brim. That wasn't successful. This guy will be fun to write about. He reminds me of home.


These monsters look like idiots. I like them.


Here's another one for the troglodytes. I plan on partially describing the text scrawled on some of the stones. The stone worshipers don't know any better, they are all baleful illiterates, but someone put it down on there for a reason.


I picked up a clear oil pastel to experiment with light rays. Previous attempts had failed, but this method worked out. Future attempts didn't, but if it can be done once...


I like this one. Semi-skeletal elk leaping through the mist are always appreciated by me. More experimentation with the oil pastel here, which you can't see. But that's the point.


These monsters look like they are mentally retarded. The two big ones. I can imagine the noise they make in my head but it's hard to paint that. Light ray failure here. It was supposed to look very different. Ah well.


This one was the first outright, complete and utter fuck up. Initially, I had a picture of a knight riding a goat here. Almost. The goat looked good to. Amazing in fact. I could say whatever I want about you, you won't know the difference. Suffice to say, it would have made Michelangelo weep. It would have made Da Vinci break his own hands with a machine he designed to that purpose. But a mishap involving a wobbly table leg and a drunk german made my hand slip and I ran a line of thick ink across the thing. Nothing for it, I covered it over with a giant monster and made due. I like the result, but no renaissance greats are going to fall on their sword about it.


After this point I had a stronger idea of how I wanted to group things together. I decided to do several I could link to the hunter. Naturally, a tree house would be required. Normal houses get crushed underfoot in this forest far too often.


The hunter again, with the freshly killed ghost of some kind of monster. I'm going to include field notes explaining the lifecycles of the various apparitions and terrible monsters in the forest. Mostly because I've already thought it out in some capacity and it would be wasted effort otherwise.


This is the thing being hunted by our esteemed gamesman. Rampaging around the place, ghosts grow furious here with age.


A little insight into the savage tribes of forest barbarians. I think the logic here is that these strange pillar monkeys never seem to leave, and they never seem to get stepped on, so it must somehow be safe to build a village around their stone columns. It seems to be working.


Barbarian religious ceremonies often involve autoecstatic conflagrations induced by skull worship. It's normal.


AX FIGHT!!! For the conflict chapter, clearly. There isn't much to explain. Ax fighting is objectively awesome. Anyone trying to refute this point is probably the owner of a shovel concern, working for the powerful shovel fighting lobby.


The barbarians heading toward their inexorable date with ax-fighting destiny. The prey fervently to the goddess of ax fighting. They'll do fine. Like the mighty sand people before them, they ride in single file to hide their numbers.


And the troglodytes march. Unlike the mighty sand people before them, they do not march in single file. They have a very tentative grasp on numerology and mathematics in general, so I don't think they are terribly concerned with people knowing how many of them are around.


Needing more bulk in the troglodyte department, I did this. The various troglodyte leaders tie antlers and horns to their heads in order to beguile the other forest inhabitants. It doesn't work, but they give them some degree of begrudging pity because it's just such a stupid idea. Right now this dog is just feeling sorry for the old boy. Despite (or because of) it's simplicity, this is one of my favorites


A hunting party indeed! Troglodytes will eat anything they can get their hands on, but sometimes some splinter faction rubs a few of their beleaguered brain cells together and hatch a hunting plan. Generally they have about a 50% casualty rate, but that just means more monster steaks for the remaining members.

And there you have it. The last one (there are 36 pages in this moleskine) is almost done. I might do some more to fill things out. I'll say more on it when I actually finish, I don't want to jinx myself. I am prone to self-jinxery.

I don't know what I'm going to do when I finish this. Maybe more. Maybe see how doing all this crap has affected my watercolor. Hopefully in a positive way, I was getting very tired of looking at anything I did with watercolor. I need to write things, both for this and my previous book project. I need to get my personal affairs in order. Those are scatter to the winds. In any case, the future looks disordered and bleak. To quote a great (though fictional man), "My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence." In this case replace cryptograms with monster skeletons, as I don't do as much code cracking in my free time as ol' Sherlock. But still. Things have been better for me in some ways. I stopped drinking, I'm getting myself ready to get back to practice. I've been reading like crazy. I've finished 5 books in the past 3 weeks, and some old classics I hadn't revisited in awhile. It feels good. I'm slowly learning my self reliance again. I'm thinking about moving to Montana.