With trick or treaters about to converge on my front porch I thought I’d better get in one last Hallowe’en related post! Every night this week my bedtime stories have come from this handsome hardcover collection of John Stanley’s Melvin Monster.
Frankly ( or should I say “Frankensteinly” ) I totally missed this Melvin character when I was a kid. But I’m glad the folks at Drawn & Quarterly had the good sense to give these old Dell Comics the first class treatment they deserve. Stanley’s sense of humour is … odd. Very engaging and slightly disconcerting – just twisted enough to make the Melvin Monster experience interesting, even for adult readers (tho’ these stories are fun for all ages).
The John Stanley Library is trickling out from D&Q – Raincoast Books just sent me the first volume of Stanley’s Nancy comics. These books are designed by Sethwith many beautiful touches that make it quite clear he has genuine affection for the material. For example, the end papers pattern from the Melvin volume which I’ve used here as a backdrop, the embossed foil type treatments on the covers and no attempt made to hide the fact that these pages were shot from yellowing old comic books (giving them a nice warmth and a sense of nostalgia) . Great stuff!
Jude “Grimbo” Beers presents his third annual 13 Nights of Halloween series of speed-paintings. Last year he did Batman villians, and the year prior was Scooby Doo Villains. This year he tackles a subject close to all our hearts, I’m sure, Classic Monsters of Filmland.
Only two more sleeps ’til Hallowe’en, kiddies! If you youngsters need a little help drawing monsters, then Monsterman ‘Scary’ Harry Borgman can help.
Way back in 1974 Harry drew a little booklet called “How to Draw Monsters”. By then, Harry had been drawing cars, people, landscapes and just about anything else you can think of for more than three decades. Harry began his commercial art career in Detroit in 1946.
Harry’s varied career has given him a wealth of esoteric experiences. For instance, though he was never one of “Mad’s maddest artists” he was one of Sick’s sickest artists. The cartoon creeps below are a great example of his ’sick skills’.
Harry is now 81 and still going strong. In fact, he’s just celebrated the first anniversary of his blog. Drop by Harry Borgman’s Art Blog and you’ll see for yourself that this amazing illustrator can teach you how to draw monsters… and a whole lot more!
* I’ll be featuring a dozen scans from “How to Draw Monsters” on my own blog on Saturday October 31st, but you can preview them all ( and tons of other amazing Harry Borgman art) in my Harry Borgman Flickr set.
Err… “frightening females”? … “gruesome gals”? I’m running out of alliterative descriptions for the titillating topic of petrifying pin-ups!
Anyway, Matt Dixon’s wonderful women are hardly horrific, gruesome or frightening… if anything they’re delightfully creepy ( in a cute and playful kinda way ). On his website Matt tells us, “I’ve been an enthusiastic waver of pens and pencils for as long as I can remember.”
“Digital art first captured my imagination when I began to assemble images from ASCII characters on a Commodore VIC-20 way back in 1980,” says Matt. “Happily, things have moved along a little and Adobe Photoshop allows me to achieve slightly more sophistacted results than I got back then.”
No kidding! I found Matt’s work featured yesterday on the front page of CGHub, but the gaming industry found Matt long before that. He’s been creating artwork there since 1988 and says, “I was privileged to be involved with numerous high profile game and movie licenses, including Harry Potter, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon and Pirates of the Caribbean.”
Matt, who includes Norman Rockwell and Robert McGinnis among his inspirational influences, now works freelance providing illustration and concept design for print and digital media. On top of his busy workload he somehow still finds the time to dish up deliciously deadly damsels for us to adore. Now that’s what I call a Hallowe’en treat! Matt Dixon’s website
Aly Fell is a 3D animator, modeller and concept artist for TT Fusion Games near Manchester UK. Aly loves to draw and paint pin-up art and does it magnificently well!
Aly’s girls have a wicked sense of humour. They often pose in costume against retro backgrounds culled from b-movies, dime novels, and tattered old comic books. When the mood strikes him, Fell can deftly emulate the form and content of a Robert McGinnis crime paperback or a Gil Elvgren calendar page…
Almost all of Aly Fell’s creations are done for personal enjoyment – not as commisions. “I have a full time job and rarely have time to do my own work,” he writes on his website. Yet find the time he does (thank goodness for us!), often creating these masterpieces for the “Character of the Week” design competitions at conceptart.org
Aly Fell also has a blog where you’ll find his latest Hallowe’en-themed illustration.
If the denizens of Richard Scarry’s Busy Town had children, and those children grew up and moved to Tokyo and dropped E at a Tsu Shi Ma Mi Re concert and woke up the next morning pregnant and decided to keep the babies, and those babies grew up and had a huge fight with their parents and jumped on a freighter bound for Colombia and ended up in a squat in Bogota, they might look something like the hilarious, angry, stressed-out, manic critters that populate the imaginary world of Laura Osorno.
Also they are very cute.
Also, sometimes they are zombies. But still very cute.
Laura Osorno was born in Bogota, Colombia. She has been illustrating since her last years of school. She studied graphic design in Bogota and has been based there ever since.
I absolutely love Laura’s character designs. She marries a raw, uncultured punk sensibility to a sophisticated understanding of design and execution to create delightfully ugly creatures you just can’t resist. They’re like little strung out hoboes you stumbled over while walking past the methadone clinic – but the cutest little darling hoboes! You just want to take ‘em home and tuck them into your bed and cuddle them!
With Hallowe’en just around the corner, Laura Osorno draws her coolest, cutest, creepiest creations on the window of a Bogota restaurant.
Over the next week I’ll be posting ten trick-or-treaters here and on my Flickr page. They need names and maybe little descriptions. This is where you come in. In the comments section here and on my blog you can give each character a name, and tell his/her story.
The contest is being judged by Adam [Rex] himself, world-famous author Judy Sierra, and if I can talk them into it, my kids. The winner will receive a copy of the book that Judy wrote and I illustrated called BEASTLY RHYMES, signed by me and I’ll draw the winning character in it. There will likely be more prizes as well. Stuff like canned fish and M&Ms. I hope to announce the winners on Halloween, Friday October 31.
A kids’ book about a vampire illustrated by J. Otto Seibold? Yes please!
I just snagged Vunce Upon a Time by Siobhan Vivian and J. Otto Seibold, and it’s pretty great. Seibold, the visual brain behind Olive the Other Reindeer and the oh-so-cute Mr. Lunch brings his inimitable manic style to the world of Halloween, and it’s pretty much just what you’d expect. The 2-page spread of a town of trick-or-treaters is like a Where’s Waldo? of monsters, creeps, and ghouls that’s worth the sticker price alone.
This is so great! If I lived in a ground-level house, I’d do something like this in my windows for sure. Mark Gervais uses Flash and After Effects to create these amazing Halloween animations that he projects onto his windows on Halloween. He’s selling DVDs, too, so you can spook up your own windows or party walls.
Just in time for Halloween, Nathan Mazur (
