Workbench – Page 12 – Grimmleigh's Lab

Monsters and Luchadores! Monsters! AND! LUCHADORES!

I get these horrific creative blocks from time to time, and nothing that I am working on has the power to move my pen. When times like these come up, I draw monsters. This week, though, luchadores worked themselves into the mix, because, well, luchadores.

Luckily for me, these little drawings got me fired up about the Night Circus, so I designed the background monsters for the circus:

img_0194-edited — *the Night Circus* artwork ©2016 L. G. Kade

I got lucky this week, too. The next page for the Miller’s Daughters decided to stop being such a brat, and I was able to get the inks done for that one, too. I should have the fully finished page up tomorrow!

I have a few friends that extol the virtues of warming up with “meaningless” doodles before a drawing session, and I am really beginning to understand why. That practice not only loosens up your wrist and fingers, it also loosens up the creative faculties in your mind, making you a better conduit to express your thoughts!

Workbench

The Crystal Ball Predicts…

This week’s look at the workbench is for an upcoming storyline in Grimmleigh’s Morbid Tales for Dreadful Children. The story is called the Night Circus, and it only draws a ton of inspiration from Something Wicked this Way Comes. In this story, the circus comes to a new town during the new moon, and when the sun rises all of the adults of the town are gone. The hero of the Night Circus is a little girl who wakes up during the night, and realizing her mother is gone decides to take matters into her own tiny hands. Here are a couple of pages of concepts for the story:

Workbench

This Week on the Bench

It’s a day late, as I am still getting my feet under me after Comic Con; but here, with some small amount of fanfare, is this week’s look at what I’m working on!

monsters, Workbench

The State of My Union, part One

It’s been a roller-coaster of a month. Sales on Grimmleigh’s Beastly Oddities are still clocking in at a better than (I) anticipated rate, which is really super exciting. The down side? Well, I really need to get more work done on the follow-up book, Grimmleigh’s Classic Monsters.

I have two completed pages, and I am applying lessons learned from the first book to these images. First off, I’m drawing the backgrounds separately, which is allowing me to experiment with the sizing of the characters on the finished page. This should cut down on characters getting clipped during the print process, since I am going for a full bleed on the layout.

Here’s the background for a daycare center:

Messy Room

Now, with the Vampire Brides from last week:

Vampire Brides

Concept sketches are done for another 8 monsters, so I will be spending the next few weeks getting those ironed out, backgrounds rendered, then layouts. I aim for 23 coloring pages in each book, plus stories, so it’s a bit of a process!

Progress on Grimmleigh’s Morbid Stories for Dreadful Children is coming along nicely, with page 23 posting to Tapastic last night, and pencils for page 24 and 25 in the rough stage. I am hoping to get back to a weekly posting schedule with that story!

Going back through previous pages, I realized that I need to go back and re-work a number of pages. Some of the previous pages are formatted differently, and I need to get a unified font size in place. Luckily, that will just make everything flow better, so I am happy about that. I also realized that I forgot to even introduce the Miller, which is probably just a smidge confusing.

The real challenge for this next week is going to be Salt Lake Comic Con. I have a ton of panels, three live recording sessions of Geekshow, and a role playing game scenario to create. That being said, I’m setting a personal goal to keep daily posts going here!

Workbench

Workbench Wednesday: Sewer Edition

Odin’s Day again? Time for another look at what’s on the workbench!

Work on Morbid Stories for Dreadful Children continues, with Volume One: The Miller’s Daughters about two-thirds finished. Here are the pencils for page 23:

I am laying in digital inks now, and will feature a time-lapse film of the finished art on Friday! For a look at the scripted breakdown of page 23, take a look here!

The next coloring book is underway as well, with pencil concepts making way for some background art. First up, a Nosferatu who has the unfortunate job of Sewer Inspector:

Here’s the finished inks for the sewer:

Rough concept for the Phantom of the Opera, who landed a terrible gig as a Karaoke DJ:

These will be featured in Grimmleigh’s Classic Monsters (with terrible jobs), which I am expecting to have available in late September!

And these two are super rough speed sketches that I put together while watching old Hammer Horror movies the other night. The tree scene will probably be used with a vampire or in one of the fairy tales, and the graveyard will be for a Slavic grave goblin:

I really am drawn to floating apparitions in the woods…

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Have a great one!