Here’s a look at what I have going on this week on the “workbench,” which is actually a couple of spiral-bound sketchbooks. Unless I’m sculpting, in which case it really is a workbench.
My creative process is pretty wonky, but it works for me. I sit down with a paper and pen, and just start doodling. I learned this (and a lot more) from a few Jake Parker videos at the awesome Society of Visual Storytelling. Just sitting pen to paper gets the hand warmed up, and gets your brain synched up with your fingers. From there, you either end up with some ideas that you can expand on, or you just spent some time warming up. If ideas come, I work on those next, if it’s a warm-up session, I try and work on projects that I started earlier. Most of this happens between 11pm and 3am, which seems to be when I am at my most creative.
This week has been all about the (surprise!) monsters. I started out working on a new book project chock full of mythological monsters from around the world, but my brain decided that it wanted to draw classic movie monsters with lousy jobs.
The Monster as a Grocery Clerk. I thought a wolfman kid on the belt would be funny.
The Bride at a call center. If you’ve ever worked one, you’ll understand.
Vlad as a lifeguard.
Quick pen sketches of the Roy Ashton Wolfman makeup
Vampire Brides, probably at a daycare.
This was from the earlier project, he was going to be a Strigoi, surrounded by the withered husks of his family.
A couple of these will get expanded upon, and probably end up in one of the books. The old Strigoi might end up in something else altogether; he’s just the right amount of creepy, so I’ll flag him in the creepy file for later.
Last night’s Midnight Monster Madness poll went well into the morning, with a lot of really good (and goofy) candidates for this week’s art drop. We had everything from a chupacabra to the elusive Gingersquatch suggested, but there was one clear winner in the, ahem, pack.
It seems people are crazy for werewolves. Very specific werewolves, in fact; you seem to like your lycanthropes in leopard print. At tea parties.
And this is why I love you.
Here are the pencils for this week’s art drop!
The finished piece will be 5×7 inches, inked on card. It will be hidden somewhere in Salt Lake City either Friday or Saturday this week, stay tuned for more details!
My Spectral Consultant whispered something into my ear last night.
“Regular content is a must if you are going to make it in this world..” it whispered. Then it licked my ear. CREEPY. I opened my eyes, and my dog was standing on my chest, staring at me. Could my chihuahua actually be my Spectral Consultant? Impossible.
I’m listening to my consultant, though. Dog, Daemon, or daisy, it was right. I need regular stuffs to keep the peeps coming back. I like monsters. YOU like monsters (please like monsters). So, let’s check out a monster!
This week, we’re going to travel to the middle of Olde Europe, and take a look at a rather twisted sort of vampire. It’s hungry. It’s dead. It likes the taste of pyjamas.
My fellow cognizants, please keep flash photography to a minimum. It’ll eat you. Please extend a hearty hello to the Nachzehrer.
“Get your own shroud!”
The Middle Ages were tough, folks. People were dropping off like flies, mostly due to diseases that simple hygiene and a lack of raw sewage could have helped prevent. But, if there is one constant in the human condition, we will look to the supernatural for the cause of a problem, even if the physical world is crawling with the answer.
Scared people were desperate to explain why so many friends and neighbors were wasting away. It couldn’t be the piles of trash and roving rat colonies, so it was most likely some sort of malevolent entity. Maybe someone who was already dead… Far easier to rationalize Uncle Peebo coming back to life than think too much about the river of poo you had to jump over to get to your job at the muck sorting factory.
This is pretty much the conclusion people in parts of Germany and Poland came to. Whole families were dying, and it was probably because someone in the family shuffled off this mortal coil, got bored, got hungry, then came back to eat mom and dad. If the first person in the family to die took their own life, that made the evidence even more damning.
The Nachzehrer would feast off the life energy of its victims, causing them to waste away. It was a lot easier for people to believe that a vampire was killing everyone in town than dysentery or plague, so the belief spread and people kept on dying.
The Nachzehrer was a bit quirky, even for this period of time. They really liked the taste of their funeral shrouds, so if you were hunting one, all you had to do was hold really still and listen; the Nachzehrer could be heard calmly munching away on its clothes. They also liked to sleep in their tombs, sucking on its shroud with one eye open, clutching its own thumb.
“munch…munch… munch”
The Nachzehrer was also a bit of a show-off, and liked to climb into church towers during the dead of night and ring the bells. Anyone who heard the bells ringing during the night was most likely to die. It’s also said that the shadow of a Nachzehrer would kill anyone it came into contact with, and something about them being able to turn into pigs, but that’s just goofy.
If you found a Nachzehrer, you could end its killing spree by placing a coin in its mouth then chopping off its head. The coin would paralyze the vamp for some reason, which we can just chalk up to Middle Ages Logic. There is even evidence that some overzealous hunter skipped the coin altogether; the remains of a woman in Venice were found in a plague grave with a brick shoved between her teeth. That’ll show her!
I will be featuring a Nachzehrer in an upcoming book; this drawing was the first coloring page, but I’m going to re-do it; something about the Nachzehrer’s passion for garment eating is too good to pass up!
Is there an old monster you would like to see highlighted here? Let me know in the comments section!
Grimmleigh's Lab 