Start to End: Zombies Love Brains

Very soon (October 21st) you’ll be able to get your hands on this great little book I did the illustrations for.

Zombies Love Brains is a salutary tale for young readers, aged 3 and over, which explains that becoming a zombie is no reason to be impolite to others, or to take things that don’t belong to you without asking first.

You can order a copy on Amazon here.

Here’s how I went from sketches to final art for a page depicting total world domination!

First pencil sketch.

Quick ink.

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s the boy in color along with an image of the earth I had on hand.

Final art. Look out world, he’s coming for your braaaaaaiiins!

(As long as he can get permission to do so that is.)

Drawings to Final Art: Granny Loves Brains

Very soon (October 21st) you’ll be able to get your hands on this great little book I did the illustrations for.

Zombies Love Brains is a salutary tale for young readers, aged 3 and over, which explains that becoming a zombie is no reason to be impolite to others, or to take things that don’t belong to you without asking first.

You can order a copy on Amazon here.

Here’s how I went from sketches to final art for just one page.

Zombies love brains more than granny loves brandy. And here she is in all her wrinkly glory. She’s not even dead, just pickled in brandy like the teeth in her glass.

Here int he inking stage, still an area I really want to improve in, I had all sorts of trouble deciding what to do with the dog’s left leg.

All that sorted out we have old Blue the faithful hound with something in his jaws. I think it’s a zombie hand.

And here’s the final art.

I’m still moving towards better color and line work over time. Many of the scanned images lack the pop of the original art though it’s often hard to tell unless they are side by side.

So keep an eye out as more and more zombies invade this Halloween and if you’re looking for a fun Halloween story for your kids, I’m sure you’ll love this one.

Sketch to Final Art: Zombies Love Brains

Very soon (October 21st) you’ll be able to get your hands on this great little book I did the illustrations for.

Zombies Love Brains is a salutary tale for young readers, aged 3 and over, which explains that becoming a zombie is no reason to be impolite to others, or to take things that don’t belong to you without asking first.

You can order a copy on Amazon here.

Here’s how I went from sketches to final art for just one page.

Here, two of the kids are trick or treating. Except one of the kids isn’t in costume. He’s a zombie with a bucket full of juicy brains.

 

Unfortunately the zombie as trick or treater didn’t fit the timeline of the story so, my zombie buddy has been turned into a vampire instead.
Here’s the inked line work. This is really an area I’d like to be better at. If I can one day afford to get a tablet to do the line work digitally it’ll be great.

Here’s the near final color work. All the elements are colored in and I’ve added the older brother and sister zombies to the background, searching for candy? or sweet, sweet brains?

This isn’t the final art for the book but I dropped this quick image of the night’s sky in for this blog post.

What do zombies smell like?

I’ve often thought that one of the things missing from our experience of movies and other visual media is the immersive sense of a place that comes from actually being in an environment. That’s a hard thing to convey. An author might describe it to us by alluding to something or describing it. Really talented authors might even have incredible ways of putting language together that surprise or baffle the readers.

Raymond Chandler was great at this with lines like:
“To say goodbye is to die a little.”
“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”
“She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.”

But what do the dead really smell like?
I’m really tempted in writing this to go and look it up and will when I’m done but let’s keep this simple and focussed on the idea at hand. Describing an environment is a hard thing to do and one thing that gets described or shown to us very little is the smell. The heavy stink of death should be rampant in the worlds of the living dead but we hardly ever think of it.

There are some stories that say the dead don’t really rot beyond a point or that they are simply dead but strangely don’t stink much. The Walking Dead made it a point to say the living stink pretty bad but very differently from the dead. Though that fact seems to get overlooked rather frequently as the story telling asks for it.

Have you smelled the dead? Really gotten a heavy whiff? I have, just once. It was a rotted, tiny thing in a yard. It was high summer and it had died and rotted quickly. The smell was at once repugnant in a way that reached all the way into the back of my throat. And at the same time it was sweet. Like a great wealth of honey somehow turned sour and hostile. It was like a vapor and like a syrup. It was heavy and at the same time seemed to burn like menthol. Though at the time I had never smelled menthol so I could only describe it like vapo rub. It was all these things and more at once.

For more on the stinking dead check out my kid’s book and my Line Stickers.