Grave Yard Haunt

There is a saying, allegedly of Chinese origin, that goes "May you live in interesting times." It's thought to be a curse rather than a blessing. I've had an interesting month.
Nobody has died (yet), or ended up in hospital (well, once, briefly), or lost their job (That I know personally), or have gotten a divorce (thus far) but a great many things have occurred to lower my priority on updating the blog. I can't go into all of them, so I won't go into any of them, but this is the reason I've not updated the blog so far this month, and why I've barely sketched at all recently.
That said, I have painted a second commission and I'm working on a third - This entry covers the second. It's not a particularly mature subject, but you should be warned that zombies walk below.

And there they are, walking. Why are they walking? Well, they're zombies, that's what they do. Not for nothing is the comic turned TV show called The Walking Dead. But looks can be deceiving, for these zombies just look like they're walking, when in fact they're standing very very still.

"Can you do me a painting?" I was asked by a friend at work (We'll call him "Moby"). "Depends," I replied "I'm already scheduled for one piece by the end of the month, so I can't do anything complicated."

It turned out that he wanted a painting of some zombies for his wife's birthday, "in the style of a horror comic cover." You may find this somewhat strange, but you're not familiar with Moby and his wife. They live for Halloween. Each year, starting in August, they begin construction of a "Yard Haunt" for All Hallows Eve. Over the years this has grown into quite a display, with witches cackling over cauldrons, transforming werewolves, giant spiders, custom made gravestones for fictional characters and a red lit vampire overseeing it all; but the center piece is the zombies - lots of them.

A couple of years ago I based this speed paint on the vampire in their display, and Moby's better half was so taken with it I was asked if they could print a copy, which I believe is now hanging in their hallway, so naturally as a dutiful husband Moby felt that if she liked that she'd like a more polished piece even more. Enter me.

There was a catch though - it had to be finished by noon on her birthday in order for him to get it printed and framed (yes, this is another digital piece - I'll get around to real paint again eventually), and it needed to be poster sized. So, a tight time limit (12 Days) and a hefty resolution (The biggest I've done). No problem! How hard can it be?

The next day I had these rough sketches and a contract. Signed and paid (up front, no pressure then), "something like the second one" selected and a handful of reference photos handed over I went home and got started.

Firstly I had a small problem. The photos were generally of a good quality, with lots of shots of the three zombies I was to paint, but none of them were from terribly useful angles, and every one had different lighting to the others. I don't think there was a clear shot of their feet either. Tricky... Need a solution. I could draw the figures, but that's a little hit or miss for something that needed to be complete in 11 days, so I turned to a package called "Daz 3D" that allows you to pose figures in 3D. It's designed to do all sorts of fancy things, but for the purposes of this exercise we can think of it as a high-tech version of those wooden artist dummies (which always seem to be crap, by the way).

Here's the resulting render; Originally I was planning on lighting it like this, but gave up on that idea fairly quickly. You'll note I've also mocked up a basic graveyard, but for time reasons I ended up only completing the front two gravestones. The poses are based on the actual poses of the Yard Haunt zombies so as to be as authentic as possible. The heads would eventually be based directly on the photographs I had with the lighting tweaked to better fit the scene.

I kept each major element on it's own layer to save time, although that actually didn't work out as well as I'd hoped since the image was so big my PC choked on it and slowed down a lot. Still, it did allow for easier tweaks as I went along. Here you can see the development of the layout and the color scheme as well as the first pass on the the zombies. I had no idea what I wanted in the background at this point, other than "Trees", so that's a bit rough. These four images show the first bit of digital "trickery" as well - I resized the female zombie after first painting her so she didn't seem to loom over the one in front (the second time was resizing the lead zombies head later on, though I regret that in retrospect).

It was around the time of the first of these four images that my PC caught a virus and I managed to lose two hours of actual work as a result, plus about 8 hours of painting time while I cleared it off my system. Nasty business, and the lost time was primary in my deciding to simplify the image by losing the background graves and not including the comic title as I'd originally planned.

My compromise was to make the mist a lot thicker than originally intended, and to have the trees and clouds form a skull in the background. This latter was inspired by the Mondo Return of the Jedi Poster, which is extremely cool. I didn't look up their poster until I'd completed this, but I had a recollection of it from the first time I saw it last year.

The sky and the fog posed a minor problem, and I cheated a bit by painting them half size for speed's sake and then bringing them into the final picture and painting over the top for the final result. The gravestones are based on actual ones they use in their yard display, which I thought was a nice touch, though you can barely see the one on the right of the image.

Finally, here's a more detailed look at the painting of the female zombie (they name them, but I forget the names). I can probably do better than this, but not while rushing at the same time as capturing a 50's horror comic vibe. I was concerned that my compromises would not meet with Moby's approval, but I figure that based on the time I spent on it he'd probably got his money's worth regardless. I just hoped that the birthday girl would like it.

She did, thankfully. Liked it enough that I got invited to her birthday dinner where she and her family enthused about it at length. That was nice, and appreciated, although being a humble soul I found the whole thing a little awkward (I don't do that well with compliments, don't quite know how to take them, though they're always nice to have).

So yeah, I've not seen the final print as yet, but I'm told it looks pretty great and is really big and cast a shadow over all her other presents that day, so that's great. For myself I'm not completely happy - if I were to do it again I would change the composition slightly, moving the female zombie to the front (I think her light shade draws the eye more than the guy in brown), but given the time constraints and the reception I guess I should be quite pleased with myself. I know one thing, it was certainly an interesting experience ;)