Monster Munch

Spooky Halloween!  So, here I sit, waiting for the onslaught of Trick or Treaters. I'm at my wife's PC because it's downstairs while mine is up (it's the slowest PC in the northern hemisphere I do believe).  So if I suddenly go off track and make no sense it's because I was distracted by some kid's mom in a catwoman costume or something.
So since it's Halloween I guess this should be a post about something creepy right?  Well, as luck would have it...

Yep, it's good old Frankenstein's Monster. There's more to me choosing ol' Frankie than it just being Halloween though - this post is also a plug y'see? For a book my Brother worked on. Three guesses what the book was. No, not "How to be Cooler Than Your Older Brother for Dummies," no, it's not "Look What a Lucky Bugger I am Then" either (That'll make a bit more sense if you read the blog post I have coming up in a few days). Yes, that's right, it's "Frankenstein." A pop-up Frankenstein in fact. Go buy it, IF YOU DARE! Muaahahah- oh, doorbell!

My first Trick or treater was just the delivery guy with my food. His costume (he said) was Food Delivery Guy. He took some Milk Duds (Good, 'cause we have hundreds of them). Anyway, back to The Monster.

So this image is a pencil sketch, using real pencils. I know, shocker right? It's been a while. well, Halloween is all about the shocks I guess. It took two hours, and the grey background was done digitally after I scanned it in. You want to see some progress shots? Well, OK then.

Trick or treaters...   Anyway, so this is the initial pencil sketch, scanned about 30 minutes in.  It's a lot lighter than this on the paper (you can barely see it) so I adjusted the contrast so you're not looking at a white rectangle.  Oh, and if you didn't know already, this is based on Boris Karloff's portrail of The Monster.  Not much else to add - his right ear is too low, but I noticed and fixed it later on.  Sadly I didn't notice at this stage, so it was much later on.

Coming along nicely now.  Ears a bit wonky still, and I also realised that the left side of his head was too low.  I built that up with some hair for the next scan; that seemed to work well.  At this point I'm working with 2H and 2B pencils (The initial sketch was 4H).  I may have started using the 4B by this point, not sure.  This is 65 minutes into it by the way.

 Now it's getting somewhere.  Tweaked contrast again, but not by much.  I think I had just pulled out the 8B pencil for this one (You can see it on his right hand side, with the ear and the bolt)  It really doesn't look all that different from the previous one, but the ear is fixed and it's a lot darker overall (But you can't tell due tot he normalised levels I guess).  90 minutes in; Time to really work into it with the 7,8 and 9 B pencils.

This is how it popped out of the scanner when it was done.  It looks a lot darker when you see it in person, so I guess the bright scanner light brightens it up.  I adjusted the final image (at the top) to compensate for that.  I also skewed is slightly up on the left of the image - The slight droop there is pretty much unnoticeable in the sketch on the paper, but once it's scanned in it becomes so glaring it's painful.  It's not by a lot (3 degrees or so) but makes a big difference.  So there we go, this is how I spent two hours of last week getting into the Halloween mood.  Hope it's nice and spooky for you.

Now...  What's the hold up on that catwoman?