Beasts! was an anthology from Fantagraphics Books put out last year featuring ~90 current illustrators doing their takes on classic beasts/monsters/etc. This year a spot was open and they put out a call -- submit your beast and they will choose 1 from the masses to fill the spot. So I figured what the heck. I don't think I could be selected, but what harm is there in trying?
Anyways, I started today and here is the process/progress so far. My beast is the
Brocken Bow. As soon as I read about it, I knew it was the one I wanted due to a couple of elements: clouds, mountains and fog. What better way to break out of my current drawing obsessions than to draw them some more? I know, right? Also as soon as I read about it I pictured the final drawing. Here's the first couple of doodles, drawn on the lower portion of the list of beasts already being used.
I had two ideas for the Brocken. Either horizontal hatching or this clockwise continuous line scribble thing I have been drawing for gocco prints.
Then I read another post about him and they were saying that in most cases his head appears as a "halo" of lights. So I had to decapitate the poor guy. I really was enjoying the way his head looked too. So I scratched out a tiny rough of the thing again.
And here's one of the scribbly-ones that was a final drawing but I didn't like how he looked so I have since redrawn him.
The current working version of the illustration has both variations of the monster (lines or curls) but I am leaning more towards the curly one. I may redraw the horizontal line one to see if I can get it closer to what I want, but I think it's a bit boring and less of a shadow monster thing than its curly brother is.
Here's the little mountaineer guy with the file's base purple color on top of him. Trying some minor differences in the way things are colored here.
