31 Days of HELL-O-Ween 2021:
John Carpenter's The Thing
Huzzah, I made it! Also, you didn't really think I was gonna do a "31 Days of HELL-O-Ween" without a "John Carpenter's The Thing" posting, did you? It's one of my favorite Sci-Fi/Horror movies, after all. This time, it's a self-portrait as the Blair Thing.
Time to look back at this year's "31 Days of HELL-O-Ween" and review...
THE GOOD:
While I am usually my own worst critic, I think some of the paintings I did this year turned out not too bad, or to quote "The Simpsons", I feel "less shame" about them. The ones I think turned out well are this one, "The Thing"; "The Shining" twins painting; Ash from "Evil Dead 2"; "Haxan", Pennywise from "It"; "Invisible Man" was an interesting, stylistic challenge; "Frankenstein" turned out OK; Leatherface from "Texas Chain Saw Massacre"; "Rawhead Rex"; "The Fog" digital scratchboard (the most popular of my posts so far for "31 Days of HELL-O-Ween", go figure); and "Halloween 3: Season of the Witch". There are bits-and-pieces of even the bad ones which turned out not-too-bad.
It was the case that the traditional paintings have a lot more subtlety and detail (even the not-so-good ones), which is lost during the scan. Oh, well, you can't win 'em all. Sigh...
THE BAD:
Of course, they can't all be winners, and there are some which are somewhat disappointing. As much as I like the "Re-Animator" painting, I am disappointed that it didn't quite resemble the actor enough--it was a good face, too bad it wasn't quite actor David Gale's/Dr. Hill's. The painting of Dr. Freudstein from "The House by the Cemetery" is just sort of blah, as was "The Prince of Darkness", the "Bride of Chucky", and "Blood of Dracula" Oh, and the Sugar-Plum Fairy from "The Cabin in the Woods", while mostly accurate, the mouth looks a bit off-kilter. Lastly, the first post of myself in a comic strip from "They Live", well there's 10 lbs. of crap in that 6-panel grid.
THE UGLY:
Are there some stinkers? You betcha! That "Mars Attack!" one in particular embarrasses me. Not the painting itself (it actually turned out not too bad), just the background scanned in terribly. The attempt to fix that digitally with the airbrush tool in Photoshop didn't quite turn out well, though. It was the cover-up being worse than the crime, perhaps. Alas, it was a case of me literally having 10 minutes to finish it up before having to leave for work, so a very quick attempt to digitally airbrush over the blotchy mess that was the background--Now it's a smeary, blurry mess! I may circle back to it and fix my attempt to fix it.
Also, I was very disappointed with "Psycho Goreman"; it was a fun movie and I was looking forward to painting it, but the final result just... passable.
FINAL THOUGHTS
It was a good exercise in working on trying to get a good likeness, and it forced me to practice for hours with each painting. Time on the paintings did start to increment up to the point where I was spending 6-8 hours on a painting. While that amount of focus on painting really helped improve my work, IMHO, it was also a crazy amount of time and stress to get 'em done in time for posting each day.
Of course, every year I think there's no way I can do it, but I luckily haven't missed a day, yet (fingers crossed, I won't in the future, either). Also, halfway through, I begin to think "I'll never be able to think of enough Horror Movie Monsters to finish this Quixotic bit of self-punishment...", and then when I'm finished, I have about a dozen left over I realize I wanted to do but didn't get to 'em. Next year...
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STEP ONE: Here are the digital pencils, done on a 1,500 x 2,100 canvas @ 300dpi. I did take a picture of myself as a reference, as well as a screenshot of the Blair Thing and it was just a matter of synthesizing them together.
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STEP TWO: Here's the halfway point, give-or-take. I thought it was creepier to add my mouth and extra teeth to transform up the side of the Blair Thing side.
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STEP THREE: After a LOT of noodling and adjustments, here's the finished digital painting. I spent a lot of time trying to nail down my own likeness (which makes me seem like I am marginally more of a narcissist than usual), and expanded the side-mouth out a little bit more. The shirt could have used more work, but it wasn't all that much of a focus and I was running out of time. So, we'll call it done enough! And, speaking of "Done"... that's it for this year's "31 Days of HELL-O-Ween".
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This was done digitally with Clip Studio Paint on an iPad.
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