Birology: The ZombiPied Piper of Hamlin (a work in progress)

Like Life and runaway golf carts, conversations can take odd turns. This happened to me on Facebook the other day, as a conversation with a friend about how truly awful Celebrity Big Brother is quickly took a left turn into zombie rats (yes, it is one of the weirder conversations I've had this week). And then from zombie rats we moved on to how you'd get rid of them. With a Zombified Pied Piper ('ZombiPied Piper' for short) of course! Before too long I'd blundered into creating a story...

Think about it: our fear of vermin, coupled with our morbid fascination with zombies, and Black Death parallels aplenty. Zombie rats take over Hamlin, biting folk and spreading their necrosis, until a mysterious undead figure shambles into town and promises to get rid of them...for a price.

I'm sure you can imagine what might happen next. If you can then stop! Don't ruin the ending for yourself - I haven't even thought it up yet.

So on the back of this great idea is an idea-sketch in Biro, and it's actually done on the front of a blank envelope (hey, sometimes you gotta work with what you've got. My time in the Combined Cadet Force taught me that. Or maybe it was MacGyver...)

The Piper bears close resemblance to the Ghost of Writing Future (featured last month - and last year if you're really being pedantic, seeing as it was 2011), not because all I can draw is hooded skeletons, but rather because this is just a sketch; a placeholder. I had the idea that the Piper should be Grim Reaper-like in appearance, and this was just the first (admittedly cliche) image that sprang to mind. He'll likely change as I give it more thought. What I want to keep though is the idea of he and the rats being inseparable: of them melding and spawning from his black cloak and of the uncertainty where the Piper ends and the vermin begin. I think it's a pretty cool idea for an image.

I also like the way Biro sketching looks: it makes pictures look like rough wood carvings - just the sort of period feel I'm going for.

No doubt I'll be plaguing you with more of this kind of stuff as I think more about it. Don't worry if you're not a fan of rats or undead flautists though. There'll be all sorts of other stuff coming. No idea what sort of stuff yet. It all depends on the kind of conversations I have.

Birology: Harvey 'Two-Face' Dent

Birology: Silents Night, Holy Night...

Birology: The Silence

Done on the train just now, snapped and edited and uploaded with my iPhone (First time I've ever done that - ain't technology marvellous?), a picture of a Silent (Doctor Who's terrifying foes from Season 6). Another picture done in Biro. As I said in my previous ghost post, it's my favourite medium, which is why anything I now do in Biro gets its own special title: Birology.

Ghost Writer (Pt.2) - The Ghost of the Failed Writer

Yesterday (or eight inches below this sentence), I showed you the 3 Writer's Ghosts that are going to appear in an upcoming article on Fuel Your Writing. I also did a 'Marley's Ghost' style phantom - a spirit to warn of the impending ghosts - but decided not to use it in the end as it was a) too many pictures for an article that's only 1000 words long, and b) because it's a little despairing for the vibe I was going for in the article. You can see what I mean...

The Ghost of the Failed Writer:
Just as Jacob Marley was chained and held down by money boxes, so the Ghost of the Despairing Writer is tethered to his career and bound by the chains he forged in life: the works he abandoned and never finished, all the books he hoped to publish but never did, all the ideas he left incomplete. He's an unfinished story, wandering through the space between words, haunted by writer's block. Spooky, no?

Facially he's heavily based on our fearful fellow from Munch's 'The Scream', but also has a teensy bit of Doctor Who's Silence thrown in (fun fact: as you may know, the look of The Silence was actually modelled on 'The Scream'). And I wanted him to look like he's wasting away like a struggling and starving 18th century writer. He's meant to be a terrifying, despairing creature because he represents everything a writer fears: Failure

But don't fear him. There's only one way to dispel the Ghost of the Failed Writer, and that's to pick up a pen, start writing, and never, ever stop.

Ghost Writer

It's always nice when two things you love doing reach a confluence: in this case drawing pictures to accompany an article I've written for Fuel Your Writing. As we're standing on the glittery precipice of December I had an idea for a Christmas-themed piece. It's called 'A Writer's Christmas Carol', and discusses the 3 issues, or 'ghosts' that will haunt a writer the most as they go about their hobby/career, and they're presented in the same manner of Charles Dickens' famous Yuletide tale; Past, Present and Future. I'm not going to tell you what the issues are that they represent as that'd spoil the article, but you can see the accompanying ghosts I drew to represent them.

All 3 are done in black biro. I love working in biro. It was one of the first drawing techniques I was taught, and it really lends to the Dickensian 'Phiz' sketches I was trying to caricature. Biro's excellent for shading and representing the shadows of candlelight.

The Ghost of Writing Past:

With hair of ink and a dress made of manuscript pages, the Ghost of Writing Past is meant to be a spritely and playful nymph, tearing out pages from manuscripts and books and throwing them at the writer, either trying to inspire him or to remind him of his failures.

The Ghost of Writing Present:
Based heavily on the image of the spirit of Christmas Present (especially the one in Muppets' Christmas Carol), the Ghost of Writing Present has a crown made of fountain pen nibs, and holds chains, either to help guide the writer in his work, or hinder him by chaining him up. I'm quite pleased with how bright the candle looks in this one.

The Ghost of Writing Future:
Heavily inspired by Mike Mignola's bold use of black and shadow, The Ghost of Writing Future also has a Mignola-esque skull. Writing Future's spirit is meant to be almost one with the shadows beyond the candlelight, blending into the shadows so that it's hard to see where the dark ends and he begins. Like the future itself he's there but obscure and hard to make out.

UPDATE: I'm also doing a Jacob Marley style Ghost, that won't appear on the FYW article, but will be on here tomorrow. I can't leave old Marley out.

Hope you enjoyed the pictures. You'll be able to see them with their full (and may I say very readable) article over at Fuel Your Writing in the next week or two.

A Multicoloured Post

"On your feet, Lantern."

Well, I liked the Green Lantern movie, but then I'm a Mogo-sized Green Lantern fan. Even if I wasn't then I think I'd have thought it an entertaining, if rather safe, summer movie. It was fun, predictable, and looked great in 3D. Of course I wanted more from it, but as a summer movie it did its job with flying (mostly green colours). It had a lot of nice nods to the comics for the fanboys (the dead planet Ryut - once home of angry Red Lantern Atrocitus and future planet for the forging of the Black Lantern battery, a whole host of Lanterns from the comics, a nod to Carol Ferris's future career as a Star Sapphire, and a nice after-credits sequence that I won't spoil but isn't at all a surprise to those who watch the movie or know the comics). Sadly there was no mention, hint or citrus-tinted trace of one of the best characters in comics, Agent Orange.

In the aftermath of watching the movie I scribbled this out in felt tip (I'm not keen on felt tip as I'm a bit rubbish with it, but it was all I had to hand). Although the yellow in this picture looks like fire it's meant to be the yellow light of Fear, wielded by the Sinestro Corps, subliming and disintegrating as our nameless (but Abin-Sur lookalike) Green Lantern recovers from its assault and summons his last shards of willpower for one final push...