Tag: Grimmleighs

fan art

Batman Revisited: Victor

This week we’ll look at Victor Fries, another down on his luck resident of Gotham who has had several unfortunate run-ins with Bruce Wayne’s alter-ego.

Like Selina and Harvey before him, Victor has taken to hiding from the authorities in the slums of the city. Police are afraid to do more than cursory patrols of the area, and even the Vigilante sticks to the outer fringes of the slums to enact his “crusade”.

Dr. Victor Fries was a brilliant Cryogenics expert who had pioneered a life-saving procedure that could suspend a person in “deep freeze” until cures for their diseases could be found. Eager to start live trials on human subjects, Victor put his terminally ill wife Nora through the (ultimately successful) procedure.

Lucius Fox, CFO of Wayne Industries, found the cryonics pod that Nora had been suspended in. Using his discovery as leverage, Fox forced Victor to use his knowledge of super-cold elements to plunder riches from unbreakable safes around Gotham. During one of these heists, a chemical reaction caused an explosion that doused Fries in a volatile compound that dropped his body temperature to near arctic extremes.

Surprisingly, Victor Fries did not die. Unfortunately, though, his sanity was shattered. His extreme body temperature makes him fragile in typical Gotham weather, which has caused him to retrofit an old Soviet era diving suit into a walking cryogenics lab. Dubbing himself “Mister Freeze,” Victor haunts the streets and alleys of the Gotham slums, plotting his revenge against the man who destroyed his life.

Victor Color

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:

IMG_0137

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:

IMG_0133

Here’s the finished inks for the sewer:

IMG_0132

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

IMG_0135

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:

IMG_0136  IMG_0134

I really am drawn to floating apparitions in the woods…

Thanks again for stopping by! If you like what you see, feel free to click that “follow” button! I update nearly every day, and subscribers get a handy e-mail notification when new content is posted!

Have a great one!

 

 

 

 

 

Morbid Tales

Breakdown: The Miller’s Daughters, page 23.

Over the last year I have been working on a long-form graphic novel, which will eventually comprise a collection of original Fairy Tales and macabre morality plays. The first of which, the Miller’s Daughters, is about half way done.

The villain of the story, a wandering Rake, has embarked on a killing spree. As you can see, the story gets pretty grim:

Miller Page 11 High
Page 16 of the Miller’s Daughters

The hardest part of the story, frankly, has been that I am now at the point where the Rake is murdering the protagonists of the story. I really don’t like writing about kids getting killed, but it’s a ghost story… So I have to get through this part.

Here is the script for page 22, in which the Rake confronts Ophie Miller.

Page 23

Top Panel: The Rake is perched on a branch, several baby badgers are sitting around him, staring curiously. The Rake is clasping his hands together, looking up like a man at prayer.

Text Box:

The Rake, seeing his quarry treed in such an unfortunate manner, sat down to taunt his prey.

Panel Two: The Rake’s head and hand fill about 2/3rds of the panel. He is looking up, menacing. Little Faeries, stars, and flowers are flitting about his head.

Text Box:

“You, with your hair so dark, in that tree so high, remind me of the fairy stories, young miss,” said he.

“Of lost spirits in the wood, of sylphs, sidhe, and baine,” said he.

“Won’t you join your sister, dear?” he asked, as sincere as a jackal at an abattoir.

Panel Three, lower left hand corner: Ophie is incensed, in a defiant pose she is clutching one tree branch for support while gesturing at the Rake with her free hand. She is yelling.

Text Box:

Ophie replied only with a string of newly-catalogued curses, the depth and vivid imagery of which would have changed the nature of naval operations for centuries if they had been heard by any other ears.

Panel Four: The Rake looks shocked, eyes wide open…

Text Box:

Some so boldly vulgar as to give even this calloused Rake reason to blush.

Final Panel: Text:

Fancying up a new demise for so skillful a vulgarian, the Rake rummaged around in his rucksack until he found a decent sized package; all brown paper, grease stained and wrapped in twine.

Tomorrow, I’ll post the preliminary pencils for this page as part of the Workbench Wednesday update.

monsters

Monster Monday: the Shishiga

Russia is lousy with monsters. Seriously. You can’t swing a wet kobold without hitting some sort of gremlin or beastie. And the farther you get from the cities, the more bizarre and unusual the monsters get!

Shishiga3

The Shishiga is an aquatic goblin that haunts the swamps and lakes of Russian and Slavic regions. I’m not positive that the Shishiga actually goes as far as Western Europe, but I think it’s safe to say that any area with Baba Yaga legends probably has Shishiga lurking about and mucking up the waterways.

Shishiga 1

Shishiga are not fond of clothing, they are described as being naked little fiends, with clammy white skin and tousled hair. The common Shishiga is most often seen sitting on a log or shoreline, muttering to itself and combing its hair. Sadly, this is also an omen that the person seeing the Shishiga is going to drown soon, or die of mysterious causes. Whether this death is caused by the Shishiga, or it is just acting as a messenger of death is unknown.

Shishiga4

Shishiga are notorious for harassing people, (a common goblinoid trait) and like to steal things from unwary people’s homes. The all-time favorite pastime of the Shishiga, though, is bringing misfortune to drunkards. Shishiga have been known to enter taverns and steal money, cause accidental lewdness, and manipulate a victim’s clothing so that their pants or shirts would fall off when they attempt to stand up. Some might say that drunks and cowards manufactured the Shishiga to pass the blame for their poor behavior, but those well versed in goblin psychology know the truth.

Shishiga2

The Shishiga artwork in this post are concept sketches for the Shishiga page in my upcoming coloring story book, Grimmleigh’s Mythic Horrors. My current book, Grimmleigh’s Beastly Oddities, is available on Amazon now.

 

 

Uncategorized

Fan Art: Selina and Harvey

One of the projects I am working on re-imagines the Batman mythos, with Bruce Wayne as the psychopathic one percenter who gets his kicks by dressing up in body armor and beating on street people in the slums of Gotham.

Selina Color
Selina Kyle

Selina is a young woman with a mission: She has been gathering up and caring for the feral cat population of Gotham City. The little warehouse space she shares with her feline wards is cold, and feeding so many unwanted cats gets expensive. Selina is not above petty theft (and the occasional bigger heist) to keep the kitties fed.

Harvey
Harvey Dent

Harvey Dent was once the hot-shot District Attorney playboy of Gotham City. He was assigned to prosecute Boss Sal Maroni, who offered evidence linking the heads of the Wayne Foundation to organized crime rings throughout the city. Unfortunately, the courtroom was the scene of a horrific terrorist attack that left 17 people, including Maroni, dead. Harvey Dent was assumed killed in the attack as well; the truth may be worse.

Harvey Dent has been wandering the alleyways of Gotham’s slums, fighting a one-man war against the petty thugs and drug pushers of the city’s underbelly. The fate of his victims is determined by a single flip of his lucky quarter.

Uncategorized

Workbench Wednesday: Sucky Job Edition

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.

Uncategorized

And the Winner is…

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!

Werewolf tea party

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!