Drawlloween 2017 – Day 31: Trick R Treat

Posted on October 31, 2017 by bre bro

Drawlloweeen 2017 – Day 31 is:

TRICK R TREAT

So another Drawlloween has come to an end. Each year I start and after the first couple of drawings get overwhelmed by the many more that are ahead and wonder if I will actually be able to do it, or just give up, since no one is really watching or counting. Maybe I will skip a day if I can’t come up with something or just don’t feel like it. But I actually did it again, and it didn’t even feel like a daily chore I had to get through, I actually looked forward to it. So much so, that I would up getting the next day’s drawing done a day ahead of time because I was so into it and couldn’t put it down until the wee hours of the morning. That’s why I ended up posting them on Instagram right at midnight, since most of the time, there were already done by then!

Today’s prompt was generic in order to give everyone a wild card to do whatever they wanted, but since I’ve been pretty literal about all of the days so far, I went ahead and tried to interpret this one as being like the “Toys R Us” toy chain logo with their giraffe mascot, Geoffrey. I ended up making it a giraffe skeleton and the logo jack-o-lantern orange with a skull instead of a star in the capital R. Pretty simple and not as involved as the others, but hey, I was tired and giving me too much freedom results in me being lazy, which is the entire point of this thing for me.

In any normal month, I would not be drawing anything for the fun of it, and this daily challenge is just what I need to get me to muster the same amount of diligence to create work for my own portfolio that I would give to a paying client I know is expecting something at a certain time. Now I have 31 little pieces of art I normally would never have had. Sure… much like these blog posts, practically no one saw them, or gave a flying phantom about them if they did, but the visceral social media reward of “likes” was only secondary in creating the impetus to get these done every day. So, even though I am aware I am talking only to myself here, I want to thank those who took the ride with me and those who created the ride to begin with. That’s it for another year. I may do the Caricature Resolution challenge in January too again, so there’s always to to look forward to, or away from, depending on who you are. Happy Halloween!

2016 Mountain Xpress Halloween Cover

Posted on October 26, 2016 by bre bro

For the third year (not in a row) I’ve been commissioned to come up with a Halloween themed cover design for the local Asheville alt weekly paper, The Mountain Xpress.

2016 Halloween cover for Mountain Xpress by Brent Brown

This year I was asked to do something with local architectural elements, such as the winged lions (I’ve been told they are not griffins, as they do not have the head of an eagle, just the body of a lion, with wings, but then again, I’ve read they could be either) at the Grove Arcade building. I toyed with a few ideas and we narrowed it down to just the lion statues at the Grove Arcade.

I thought that was a cool thing to play with, so I looked the historic structure up on Google Street View to get a straight-ahead view of it, then took it into a vector program and made a simple vector-art version of it that I could then distort into an extreme, bug’s-eye view perspective to add some dramatic flair to it. I then used the handy 3-D artist’s model bodies in Manga Studio (now called Clip Studio Paint for some reason) to get the correct perspective and anatomy for the hipster-clown the animated architectural animals would be attacking on All Hallow’s Eve.

The gryphons/lions I had to just create from a reference photo and so their perspective is not as extreme, since I wanted to keep them recognizable in their newly-animated, attack versions and I also had to kind of figure out their perspective on my own.

Then, it was just a matter of drawing the correct details on the reference model, arranging it with the lions I drew, rendering out lighting and shade and details on the Arcade and generally improving the whole composition, while leaving space for the heads and subheads that were to come in later.

The previous covers combined Halloween with the election, since they fell so close to the same time that year. That was fun, but also hard to come up with anything new that hasn’t already been done before since the last day in October and the first Tuesday in November are always in close approximation each year and it’s a visually and satirically temptation to want to somehow link the two. I was glad I didn’t have to do that this year, as I had already used up all my ideas previously.

2012 Halloween cover for Mountain Xpress by Brent Brown

2013 Halloween cover for Mountain Xpress by Brent Brown

2012 Halloween cover for Mountain Xpress by Brent Brown

Drawlloween 2016 Day 7: What Lies in the MIST

Posted on October 7, 2016 by bre bro

In an attempt to comically combine the two days’ drawings, I opted to take the prompt “What Lies in the Mist” literally. Therefore, the hook that Archie and Veronica found dangling from their car door yesterday, we see today belonged to an unfortunate trick or treater dressed up as a pirate and for some reason walking along the deserted rural highway.

“What Lies in the Mist” inks. Click to Enlarge.

I was apprehensive about joking around about a kid getting killed while trick or treating, but other than the equally-potentially-offensive idea of having the hook turn out to be yanked from an amputee by the road with a sign asking for help to buy a new prosthesis, it was the only way I could think to have a surprise ending that was not the expected one of the hook hand killer.

Just to assure anyone who is upset by it, the kid is okay! He was just stunned and was taken to be checked out and was back home eating his slightly run over Halloween candy that night!

Drawlloween 2015: Day 6

Posted on October 6, 2015 by bre bro

Day 6 calls for PUMPKIN:

I had to put a spin on the usual Jack-o-Lantern, so I reversed the roles and had the pumpkin carving a human and getting out all the messy insides before lighting a candle to illuminate the creepy gourd-replacement.

Inked in sketchbook, scanned in and for the first time, colored digitally in Photoshop:

click to make larger

2014 Mountain Xpress Halloween Art

Posted on October 29, 2014 by bre bro

In 2012 and 2013, the alt-weekly paper I do a weekly cartoon for, The Mountain Xpress in Asheville, NC, has asked me to come up with and create a Halloween-Election themed cover for that particular week’s issue.

This year, they just wanted Halloween ideas , but local Halloween ideas. So I came up with a bunch, mostly playing on the current “beer city” spate of breweries and such that seem to be cropping up locally.

Then Margaret, one of the editors tells me, “Looks like we’re going a different direction for the cover for Oct. 29, but I like your cartoon ideas for that issue.” So I used some of the ideas for my usual (but not as high-paying as a cover assignment, just the same amount of work) inside cartoon.

For the cover, they ended up not going with a humorous cartoon theme, but rather using a nicely done, local landmarks, spooky cover design from Jason Krekel instead. I think it turned out well, but I kind of wish they had just decided to do that from the beginning, and not wasted my time.

u Asheville Halloween ideas

AVL Halloween ideas for cartoons

Some of the ideas for the cover did end up taking the form of this weekly cartoon, which I spent a lot of time on coloring for best effect. I think it turned out pretty good, but it seemed to garner the same “meh.” response from the public as any other, less work-intensive cartoon I would do, (as far as I can tell from online and social media responses, anyway). Here is a vertical version I made for online use and the actual, horizontal one that ran in the print issue:

finished MX AVL Halloween cartoon 2014 vertical

Horizontal version, as ran in the printed issue. Click to make larger.

2013 Mountain Xpress Halloween Art

Posted on October 31, 2013 by bre bro

Last year I did a Halloween/Election cover (and inside Halloween art) for the local alt-weekly paper in Asheville: The Mountain Xpress. This year, they wanted another one, so I had to come up with a new idea and it was a little harder to try to combine the two. Here are some of the things I doodled and brainstormed on before coming up with the one we used.

The final cover ended up looking like this once the heads and subheads were added:

2013 Mountain Xpress Halloween Cover by Brent Brown

I thought it was funny using the names of actual candies like Mr. Goodbar and Milk Duds to represent candidates that may be good or duds and having the costumed children/voters have to just pick one and hope for the best.

Some people didn’t think it was an original idea, but I promise if it was not, it was unintentional, as I can’t claim to have read every single other publication in every little or big market in the previous decades to make sure we were using something no one had ever thought of before regarding the common occurrence of these two events being so close together!

Anyway, I also drew some inside illustrations, the paper said they wanted. They just meant some bats or cobwebs or something, but I thought they wanted more and spent too much time drawing these classic monsters with appropriate Halloween candy to go inside:

Some of them actually got used!

And finally, my weekly cartoon in that issue needed to be Halloween-related as well (I thought, anyway) and so it turned out like so:

Cartoon by Brent Brown

2012 Mountain Xpress Halloween Art

Posted on October 31, 2012 by bre bro

The local alt-weekly paper in Asheville, NC that I draw a weekly cartoon for asked me to draw a humorous Halloween and Election cover for the issue that would fall on the week of both those events.

I gave them some roughs and thumbnails and sketches for some classic monsters (Dracula, Mummy, Invisible Man, Frankenstein’s monster, wolf man, etc.) and, on a different tack, maybe a jack-o-lantern and a ballot box?

We ended up doing some of them voting in different, yet appropriate ways:

The invisible man is voting, of course, absentee ballot and a ghost voting reinforces the often-cited claim that dead people are voting in our elections, incurring the wrath of an angry, 17th century voter fraud mob. Dracula and his vampire fangs prefer punch ballots and Frankenstein’s creature doesn’t know his own strength when even using a tombstone touch screen ballot.

2012 Halloween cover for Mountain Xpress by Brent Brown

They liked the Republican elephant Frankenstein monster and the Democratic donkey Dracula, so I ended up drawing both of those for inside illustrations: