Krampus print and coloring contest

KRAMPUS PRINT

(coloring contest info at bottom)

 

I dunno about you but keeping busy helps me get through the holidays…which isn’t too tough since I am always busy.  last year, if you recall I about poisoned myself with chemicals in a cast/mold/airbrush Arsenic Lullaby X-mas ornament fiasco.    (That blog here ) I vowed that I wouldn’t be doing anymore fabricating of merch.

As x-mas got closer though it felt …like something was missing not adding some x-mas specific project to my already stressed out brain, so I compromised and decided to make a Krampus print.  What could go wrong with that?  So far nothing except that it turned into two prints.  I came up with these thumbnail sketches and decided they were both worth doing.

While I work I usually have some full run of a t.v. series on in the background.  I helps me mark time.  For those of you keeping track at home, from start to finish these prints took me the entire run of Band of Brothers two and a half times.  That’s World War 2 twice and then from d-day to the battle of the bulge.  Any day now I expect to have dreams of Hitler crawling down a chimney and attacking a G.I. Paratrooper, and then getting a bayonet in the gut from Santa…who has an awful case of VD from some French nurse.

anyway…though you might be interested in seeing the progression of an illustration.

Oh… these prints are available right now, along with lot’s of other stuff on out online store for you last minute shoppers.  coupon code – humbug – is good for 20% off.   http://arseniclullabies.highwire.com

…AND our X-mas Bomb Shelter is still open to you.  Blogs, podcasts, comics…hid from the happy ass holiday cheer on the interwebs here.

This is the part of an illustration that’s either the most fun or the most frustrating, trying to capture the original charm of the sketch while polishing it…i.e. making sure the perspective is right, and the bodies are in proportion and all that nonsense.  I wanted a lot of movement with these so I added extra vanishing points that way all the boxes wouldn’t be lined up like cereal boxes on a shelf.  TECHNICALLY the vanishing points on the top ( the top two thumb tacks) are wrong and impossible, but for the sake of interesting composition they are just what the doctor ordered.

 

 

of course it’s easier to do on a 4×5 sketch.  When you start on the actual 11×17 illustration you have to break out the 4 foot straight edges.  This is why I refuse to give up my 12 year old wooden folding table that I …liberated…from a fireworks stand.  It’s 3ft by 8 ft and you can just stick thumbtacks right into it.  Every three months or after it has so many tact holes I can’t work on it,  I go to Home Depot and buy a cheap thin sheet of wood to screw on the top and BAM instant new table.

At this point I realize I may have to actually break a plate in order to figure out how the shards of broken plate would look.  Which would be no problem if I owned a plate.  Off to the thrift store!

 

See that smudge just above the monsters left elbow?  That is X-mas…X-mas did that to me when I was sleeping.

At this point I am realizing that Band of Brothers really isn’t that good.  These “characters” are basically cartoon versions of actual people…the gun ho N.Y. guy, the big tough guy with a cigar in his mouth all the time…they couldn’t get food or medical supplies to the front lines at the battle of the Bulge but this guy hasn’t run out of Cigars?!   Having the guy from -Office Space- on the show though makes it all worth it.  He does a great job of just being the guy from office space in WW2, instead of trying to be some overly dramatic serious ham.

All I’m going to say here is that plate turned out f*cking great.  It was worth the 1.50.  At this point I started wondering what I should put up in the picture frame.

I picked a couple of Norman Rockwell Christmas paintings.  Is there a worlds record for the smallest fine art recreations?

 

And THAT is the finished inks.  Now then, it needs some coloring and unique paper…something festive and creepy.  I want it to have an old fairy tale look to it.  Around the third time I watched Easy Company get shot up in operation Market Garden…and why the f*ck would you but a British General in charge of anything at that point?!  they were getting their asses kicked for like 6 years, Ike shows up, starts making progress and they give the command back over the the British?….?…..?!  Operation Market garden was a disaster (of course) and was probably responsible for the Russians closing on on Berlin the same time we were, and thus beginning the cold war.  THANKS ENGLAND.

What the hell was I talking about? 

Oh yeah, I remembered a technique were you dip the pages in hot tea to dye them.  It gives them a cool old weathered look and sometimes messes with the colors giving you tones you’d never figure out on your own.  So that’s what I decided to do.  It gave me just the look I wanted.  Old, weathered, creepy, like it was torn right out of an old book of fairy tales.

My scanner doesn’t really do it justice, but you get the idea.  It’s freaking cool up close.  I only have about 40 or 50 sheets of paper that is right for this tea dying though.  Looks like this will be limited edition signed and numbered.

The other print was even more challenging …I should have taken more pics of that one as I went along

 http://arseniclullabies.highwire.com/product/krampus-print-set-full-color

Anyway…since it is Christmas, you probably could use a card.  click here for these in free downloadable card size AND…..AAANNNDDDDD…black and white versions you can color yourself and maybe win something!