Day 25: The Thing vs Thing vs Thing #1 vs Thing #2 vs Thing - 31 Days of HELL-O-Ween 2025

31 Days of HELL-O-Ween 2025:
Thing vs Thing vs Thing #1 vs Thing #2 vs Thing

This time it's Thing vs Thing vs Thing #1 vs Thing #2 vs Thing done up in a vague Mortal Kombat style.  Of course, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to decide on the order I should list the various Things and am still not sure if I should have done 'em in a different order.  Oh, well, it's not like I over-explain every joke until it is dead, comes back from the grave, only for me to over-explain and kill it again.

Addams Family Thing is paying tribute to Kurt Russel's line "Yeah, F**K you, too!" before tossin' the dynamite at The Thing.

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STEP ONE:  Here are the quick, blue-line digital pencils in Clip Studio Paint on a 3,000px x 2,000px @300dpi digital canvas.

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STEP TWO:  And here are the digital inks.

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STEP THREE:  Here are the finished colors, done on their own layer.

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STEP FOUR:  I used the Mosaic Filter in Clip Studio Paint to give it a more 16-bit Video Game feel to make it somewhat resemble the arcade version of Mortal Kombat.  There is a trade off between trying to balance the pixelated look and still keep some of the linework.

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Done in Clip Studio Paint.

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Day 31: John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) - 31 Days of HELL-O-Ween 2024

  31 Days of HELL-O-Ween 2024:
John Carpenter's The Thing (1982)

It wouldn't be "31 Days of HELL-O-Ween" without a reference to "John Carpenter's The Thing" (1982), and in this case, also a slight nod to "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" (1966).

Well, I made it to the end of "31 Days of HELL-O-Ween"...  Thanks to all of you for stopping back and the kind words of encouragement for this mad endeavor!

Every year it is a shocking amount of work that seems to increment up, taking more and more time; and every year when I am finished I swear I'm not going to do this again, and yet here we are.  On top of that, this year I had a few other things going on which I thought for sure would possibly spell me missing several of my self-imposed deadlines, but I managed to get through (barely).  For all my complaining, it is a good exercise, although I am beginning to wonder if I should change things up next year and move away from movie monsters and begin to consider broadening my horizons...

I guess we shall see.  That's a decision for future, non-tired John to make sometime next year!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

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STEP ONE:  Here are the hastily scribbled digital pencils done on a 2,550px x 3,300px canvas.

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STEP TWO:  Here are the digital inks.

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STEP THREE:  And here's the finished digital painting. 

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Done digitally in Clip Studio Paint.

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Day 01: The Thing from Another World (1951) - 31 Days of HELL-O-Ween 2023

31 Days of HELL-O-Ween 2023:
The Thing from Another World (1951)

Well, well, well.  It's time for the Fifth Annual "31 Days of HELL-O-Ween".  I can't believe I've been doing this rather harebrained, self-imposed challenge for that long.

Once again, I thought I would have everything together, maybe even get a bit of a head start to give myself a little bit of a buffer, but October still somehow manages to sneak up on me every year.  Although, I guess it wouldn't be a challenge if I set it up with everything mostly done before I even started.  So, it will be a bit of a public high-wire act where I attempt to do up 31 pieces of (mostly) monster art in 31 days, posted daily.

Alas, it's the first day and I'm already a little behind schedule and running as fast as I can to stay in place.  Will this be the year I have to break out the blank page and label it as "The Invisible Man" or a crappy stick figure drawing as "Slenderman"?  Stay tuned, folks!

Enough of the preamble--let's get this show on the road!

I'm not sure why, but I started a vague tradition of bookending the "31 Days of HELL-O-Ween" challenge by having the first and last posts include a self-caricature of sorts, and here we'll keep that tradition rolling.

It's no secret that "John Carpenter's The Thing" is one of my favorite horror movies--I include it (and several others)--every year.  But, I had yet to do the movie that inspired John Carpenter, Howard Hawks "The Thing from Another World".  I have an inordinate fondness for B-Movies and compared to the gooey body horror of "John Carpenter's The Thing", this version of "The Thing from Another World" is rather mild and tame by comparison.  I did see it as a kid and thought the alien was somehow scary, even though you only see it for a few minutes on screen.  

What can I say, I was a dumb kid easily impressed by passable special effects--and even a bunch that weren't so passible in other movies.

Hrm, the digital painting looks like The Thing tried to unsuccessfully impersonate Deiter from the "Saturday Night Live" sketch, "Sprockets" (sorry, kids, you'll have to look that reference up)...

One down, 30 to go!  Feel free to join in everyone!  C'mon in the waters... well, the water is a little cold and there is some shrinkage going on... and I think I stepped in some seaweed, so that feels gross.  But, other than that it's... Oh, wait, I think something bit me.  I hope it isn't some sort of brain-eating amoeba... [Continued complaints drone on and are lost in the distance as you back away.]

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STEP ONE:  Here are the digital pencils, originally done on a 2,000px x 1,560px @ 300dpi canvas done in Rebelle 6.  It was just a quickly scribbled

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STEP TWO:  And here is the finished digital painting.  It was basically a lot of noodling around to try and get the proper darks and lights and model the form.  That is one of the strengths of Rebelle--just mixing and blending until you arrive to vaguely where you want to be.

I exported the finished painting as a .PNG file (one for the under-drawing and one for the finished painting) and imported it into Clip Studio Paint to add the lettering and add the "31 Days of HELL-O-Ween" logo, then exported the finished drawing/painting as a .JPG.

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Done digitally in Rebelle 6 with an assist from Clip Studio Paint for the lettering and panel border.

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Day 31: The Thing (1982) - 31 Days of HELL-O-Ween 2022

31 Days of HELL-O-Ween 2022
The Thing (1982)

Aw, did you actually think I wasn't going to have John Carpenter's "The Thing" in 31 Days of HELL-O-Ween for this year?  Tsk!  Of course I was--it's one of the best horror movies out there, IMHO, and coincidentally one of my favorite horror movies (or is it the other way around?).

Well, I made it.  I somehow managed to get 31 paintings (both traditional and digital) done in 31 days.  It's my dum-dum retort to Inktober, but with any media and more Halloween/Horror/Monster-based.

In my haste, while I was working on the drawing, I accidentally collapsed the pencil and first color pass layers and just kept working on those. so no Work in Progress for the last one.  Oh, well, bullet dodged for y'all!

I'll probably do a reflection on this year's "31 Days of HELL-O-Ween" tomorrow or the next day.  Right now I've got other irons in the fire I need to work on.  See ya soon!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!  (Well, for about 35 more minutes...) 👻

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Done digitally in Clip Studio Paint.

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Day 31: John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) - 31 Days of HELL-O-Ween 2021

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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Repaneld: Fantastic Four #5

Here's the original from "The Fantastic Four" #5 by Jack "King" Kirby and Joe Sinnot:

Here's yet ANOTHER submission to the delightful REPANELED Blog.  In this case, it is from "The Fantastic Four" #5, where the FF are transported back in time by Doctor Doom to get Blackbeard's treasure... it's a LONG story.  Well, not THAT long, but you know what I mean... and it's been reprinted plenty of times so go ahead and read it if you can!

Rather than my usual colorized black-and-white gouache paintings as done in some previous posts, this was done with charcoal on 12" x 18" Dick Blick Sulphite paper (80 lb).  For those of you who just can't get enough of the process, here it is.  For all the rest, be prepared to be bored!

STEP ONE:  With vine charcoal, I **VERY** loosely blocked in where I wanted everything to roughly fit on the page in an almost cartoonish manner.

STEP TWO:  And then almost immediately smeared the whole thing into an amorphous mess.  (That's the way I usually work with charcoal.)

STEP THREE:  I start to tighten up the drawing a bit with a 4B and 6B charcoal pencil and use my kneaded eraser a LOT--both to clean up the mess left by STEP TWO and to shape the form and add highlights.  Yes, kids, the eraser can ALSO be used to draw and not just erase mistakes.  :-)

I also settled on how I wanted Ben's pirate hat to look and, for my amusement, changed the original background guy in the panel to vaguely resemble a better-known pirate from a certain movie series.

STEP FOUR:  Ben Grimm (A.K.A., The Thing) is mostly done, now.  Again, this was done with continued layering of softer charcoal pencils and kneaded eraser to lift out lighter areas and highlights.  Time to work on that pirate fellow in the background...

STEP FIVE:  Well, here's the finished charcoal drawing.  I took a picture of it with my camera and then imported it into PhotoShop to colorize it.

STEP SIX:  Here it is colorized and cropped in PhotoShop, along with the added words.  It was basically the same method I used in previous posts: Over top the original picture, I added color on the Multiply Layer, as well as lightened some areas/retouched, and added a background with a generic Cloud Filter.

Done with charcoal on 12" x 18" Dick Blick Sulphite paper (80 lb.) and colorized in PhotoShop.

I realized a little too late that I didn't leave myself enough room to rotate the image a bit as I originally intended until after I had already copped it and got most of the way through colorizing.  I should have either drawn it at the tilted, Dutch-angle in the first place (preferred), or cropped it AFTER I rotate the image and BEFORE I start colorizing the image.  I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere for me.  :-)

Now that I look at it, I almost like the black-and-white charcoal drawing better than the colorized version.  Sigh...  On top of that, in comparison, I think Kirby did a better job of capturing the pathos of Ben Grimm (well, he **IS** the "King", after all).

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