Dreamquest Illustrations

Holy shit has it really been a year since my last post?

Anyway, this coming August the H.P. Lovecraft-convention NecronomiCon is going to take place in Providence, Rhode Island, and I will be showing some artwork in the accompanying art show Ars Necronomica among a whole bunch of other creators.

Here are two illustrations of scenes in Lovecraft's "Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath" which are probably gonna be on display there. My illustrations are not super true to what's in the original text, but on an emotional level I guess they capture the gist of what's going on.

"From the motions of their tentacles Carter could see that the blunt-snouted moon-beasts were enjoying the spectacle hugely, and vast was his horror when he suddenly recognised the frantic meeping and knew that the tortured ghouls were none other than the faithful trio which had guided him safely from the abyss and had thereafter set out from the enchanted wood to find Sarkomand and the gate to their native deeps."

"Thick though the rushing nightmare that clutched his senses, Randolph Carter could turn and move. He could move, and if he chose he could leap off the evil shantak that bore him hurtlingly doomward at the orders of Nyarlathotep. He could leap off and dare those depths of night that yawned interminably down, those depths of fear whose terrors yet could not exceed the nameless doom that lurked waiting at chaos’ core. He could turn and move and leap—he could—he would—he would—
Off that vast hippocephalic abomination leaped the doomed and desperate dreamer, and down through endless voids of sentient blackness he fell."

THE MELVINS gig poster

Here's a silkscreen poster I designed for the Melvins. 

 

 

Besonders Wertlos

I recently designed this wrap-around cover and some interior vignettes for the book: "Besonders Wertlos", a collection of film reviews and other articles by Jörg Buttgereit.
The vignettes accompany the respective articles' titles and represent their subjects, and the idea was to have all the vignettes appear somewhere on the cover.
I made about 50 vignettes in total. Some are fairly hidden on the cover or only represented indirectly, but it should be easy to spot the nine below.

Fire Dancers Gif (new version)

Here’s an updated, bigger version of my firedancer gif that has been going around again on tumblr and facebook lately.
I personally never uploaded the other one - someone ripped it off of my website and posted it, and without credit.
So after seeing it pop up over and over I thought I might as well put up a proper version of it myself.

Wanted!

Here's a little Ray Murphy one-pager I did for the Portland zineVision Quest.

UNWELT

This is the cover for UNWELT, a little collection of some mostly Lovecraft-related comics and drawings of mine.

 

The Things We Do

 

 

These are a couple of panels from a new Ray Murphy comic I finished recently. The story is a loose adaptation of a chinese fairy tale, and I made it for a fairy tale-themed German-Chinese anthology project.

Captain Berlin Must Die!

I've just finished drawing a short comic which will soon appear in the second issue of Captain Berlin, written by Jörg Buttgereit.

Here are two sample pages:

...and since I noticed that I hadn"t posted this here before here's a portrait of "Butti" I did some time ago.

Octobriana / Time Machine

Here's a thing I just did for the art-zine "Couverture" - a magazine consisting only of covers. The topic for this 3rd issue is "Sexy Science-Fiction of the Post-Stalinist Age". I went for a Octobriana meets Time Machine late 60s comic cover:

The zine will be printed in duotone and at this point the two colors haven't been chosen yet, so the final result will probably look a bit different.

There's a crowd funding campaign going on to pay for the printing of the zine, so if anyone's interested in ordering an issue / supporting this project check out this link.

Updates: Zombory, Rider of the Black Sun, New Shirt Designs

So, this is kind of a general update post about things I've already blogged about, rather than about some particular new thing I've done lately.

First off, after being published as a supplement in Zone 5300 last year, my zombie card game Zombory came out in Germany a few weeks ago. For the new version I redesigned the logo and drew several new pairs - it now has 30 zombie/human pairs. Also, with some help of a co-designer, I fleshed out (no pun intended) the additional rules which I had only sketched down when I first came up with the idea. So Zombory - while still playable by the classic memory rules - now has it's own zombie-themed game mechanics and has evolved into a fun little game of its own. The game rules are being translated at the moment so I have the hope that there will be an english version at some point.  Here's the new logo and three of the new card pairs.

Last year I posted some illustrations I had done for the world's longest (apparently) adventure game book, Reiter der Schwarzen Sonne (Rider of the Black Sun). The book did rather well for something so old-school, so recently the second, revised edition came out, to which I was asked to contribute several additional drawings and a new cover. There is talk of an english edition which will hopefully be coming out in the close future.
These are two of the new illustrations:

 

Finally, I did a couple new T-shirt designs...  these are three of them:

Camus

Camus was born 100 years ago today.

Drawing (a) Monster gif

I made a gif out of my popular self portrait.

Infinite Corpse

Who knows me also knows that I'm a sucker for comic jams.
Here's my contribution to the great web-based jam Infinite Corpse.

COPY FOR CASH!

I'm taking part in the project/show "Image Duplicator" in London. It's basically a response to the  huge Roy Lichtenstein retrospective that is currently on display at the Tate Modern.
Here's the project outline:

WHERE: A show at the Orbital Gallery, Leicester Square, London
WHEN: May 16th-31st, - a week pre and post the end of the Tate's Lichtenstein show, with a possibility of extending it for another week after.
HIGH CONCEPT: Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein currently has a show on at the Tate. While the public is intimately familiar with his work, what they may be unaware of is how closely many of his images were "appropriated" from comic artists like Irv Novick, Russ Heath, Jack Kirby, John Romita and Joe Kubert, who received no fee or credit.
Is this an act of brilliant recontexturalisation? The elevation of commercial "low" art to "high" art? Art world snobbery? Artistic licence? Cultural annexation? Gallery shortsightedness? Or something else?
This show is a chance for real comic-book artists (and other "commercial artists" - illustrators, designers etc) to ask these kinds of questions and share their views, via their work.
THE PLAN:Every interested comic artist should "re-reappropriate" one of the comic images Lichtenstein used, and rework it, using some of their 'commercial art' drawing skills, to warp and twist it into something interesting and original, and in the process to comment on this type of appropriation.
The IMPORTANT thing to stress is that you'd be going back to the source material and re-reappropriating Coletta, Novick, Kirby et al - NOT copying Lichtenstein

Here's a great collection of comic panels which were copied by Lichtenstein.

Well, I chose to do a variation of the title page of "Run for Love",  from Secret Hearts No. 83, by Tony Abruzzo.  It was the model for Roy Lichtenstein's painting "Drowning Girl".

Here's the original page....

... and this is my take on it.
 

Tees

I've had some screenprinted shirts made with my Cthulhu-drawings on them. 

Luckily, I was able to find the perfect models. 

 

Monster Brains Banner

This is an image I did as a banner for Aeron Alfrey's fantastic blog Monster Brains.

Here's the original black and white drawing...

... and the final, colored version with the added title.

ZOMBORY!

These are some sample pairs from a little card game I did.
The rules are basically the same as in  "Concentration" or "Memory", the only difference being that in this case you have to find the corresponding human-zombie pair instead of identical cards.

EDIT: The game has in the mean time also come out in a bigger boxed edition with additional rules (see here) and is availible for purchase in stores and online (my webshop for example).

 

 

 

 I actually made this game a few years ago, but it just came out in a limited edition as a supplement to the 100th issue of Zone 5300.

Civics Lesson

These are two pages from a new short comic featuring my Ray Murphy character.
It's going to appear on the pages of Zone 5300 #100 (hence the dutch text), together with a little article on me and my work, plus another special gimmick I did (more about that in another post).

page1

page 2

Game Book Illustrations

A couple of drawings I recently did for the book "Reiter der schwarzen Sonne" ("Rider of the Black Sun"), by S. Harder.

 

It's an old-school fantasy game book in the tradition of Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf. 

Apparently it is the most massive book of it's kind with over 700 pages and more than 1300 sections. 

All in all I did close to 50 illustrations and vignetts for it.