Workshop Six - Terrors of the Night

Research
Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo

http://www.alvarotapia.com/

I really really like the style that this artist has got, the mix of solid black, clean lines with the use of intense colour and drips works really well, also alot of their portrait subject are to do with Horror.

Tom Whalen

I like the simplicity and colour scheme of each poster, just picking out the minimum amount of features to show the characters.

http://www.strongstuff.net/

Charles Burns - Facetasm

Burns' style is very horrific especially in the collection of work he's entitled Facetasm where he's used the idea of an exquisite corpse and just focused it on the face. The use of block black and white works well with the horrific images he's creating.

In this workshop we had the choice of either doing an exquisite corpse image, full body shot of a character into head, torso and legs, or doing horror portraits of famous characters - Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's Monster, Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, Christopher Lee as Dracula, Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, and Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter. 
I chose to focus on the horror portraits because I wanted to challenge myself for last year whilst doing 'The Great Editorial Race' I realised that I was very poor at doing portraits and want to become better at it. Firstly I started with the portrait of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's Monster because for me that's one of the most iconic horror images and whilst I was doing this piece of work I researched into Karloff and found out that he was one of the main people in most horror films of a time. Using the images of Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo as inspiration, firstly roughly light boxed around the image and then decided what was going to be blocked black, mid tone, or blank, then filled out accordingly. I then scanned this into the computer and started putting layers of green under the lines, I thought with the multiple lines over where I wanted mid tones this would make those sections look darker but it wasn't as clear as I wanted it to be so I darkened those areas more. I then turned down the opacity on the colour and put drips of blue behind the image, I chose blue because I think it complements with green in the face. To set the whole image off I put a dirty mustard as the background.

 

Next I went onto Christopher Lee as Dracula because I wanted to keep with the most well known classic monsters. Again, using the images of Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo as inspiration, firstly roughly light boxed around the image and then decided what was going to be blocked black, mid tone, or blank, then filled out accordingly. I then scanned this into the computer and started putting layers of blue and red (in the areas of blood) under the lines, unlike before with Frankenstein's Monster the multiple lines over where I wanted mid tones did make the sections look darker. Then once again I then turned down the opacity on the colour and put drips of red behind the image, I chose red to make the image look really bloody. To set the whole image off I put a darker blue as the background, I was going to use a black background to that meant the image was lost more.