Tales From Castle Diablo Artwork

Hello there

I had a crack at writing some Castle Diablo stuff today, but it had varying success (not any).

Head's a bit all over the place, writing wasn't coming easy, and I cried off my Forty20 article for this month, which I always feel ghastly. Still, I wanted to do something a bit productive, so opted instead to do some bits of potential artwork to go with the Castle Diablo stories, which is what I'll show you today. 

It wasn't a new idea, I'd always wanted to do some artwork to accompany the stories, and very much wanted it to be a bit simple and gothic.  I've used a lot of pencil work (if digital still counts as pencil), and been using some weird and wonderful reference pics to try and piece them together.I think they are alright.  Maybe not print-worthy for the book itself, but they're interesting images I think.  They might be fine for the book, I've only just done them so am still in the tutting phase...

This first one is from the existing story "Flies" - which is already in one of the Tales From Castle Diablo posts on here in its entirety, if you wish to read it. I mean, there's not an awful lot to say about these pieces, so I'll just show them to you and you can shrug or smile.

That's an excellent advert to get you to read the story, eh?

All these images are meant to be a bit on the creepy side, but I think that's the worst one.  I thought I might just put one fly on the window, but eventually went with the old adage that more is more.

The next two sort of go together.  This is from a forthcoming story, provisionally entitled The Twins. I only really wanted to do one image for each story, but I found the first one to be unusually inspirational, and ended up writing a lot of notes and planning for a forthcoming story from it.  Because that had helped I decided to do another one that follows on from it.  

That's the first one, here's the one that follows on from it...

I know...

I think the reason this has been useful, is it's been sort of mediative and provoking a lot of thought.  It takes so long to draw stuff, and when you're fixating on details you end up thinking of options of stories.  It's hyper observant, so the things I noticed about where they were looking, and how they were stood and all that business, little subtleties, ended up being potential decisions for characters and plot.  It wasn't really my intention but it was a very welcome side-effect.

Finally, the other evening I'd stayed up late trying to design/draw the castle itself.  I discovered two things.  Firstly, I really don't know much about castles, and secondly, I really am not very good at drawing things when I don't already know what they look like.  I chopped a load of different castles together for this, and you can't half tell.  On the positive side though, the castle is meant to look wrong.  Obviously I want it to be creepy and stuff, but also just fundamentally not observing architecture in a pleasing way.  Even gothic castles can look very beautiful (most do), but I am equally satisfied with it being "off".  The only thing I will point out as not a failing in my artwork, is that it is intentionally marginally lopsided.  That's within the story itself, so I'm not taking the bullet for that.  It would be really easy for me to straighten it, as the castle is on a different layer to everything else, so the fact I haven't shows I meant it. You hear me?  I MEANT IT.

I had a mess around with some attempts at putting in colour, but it'll need a fresh go I think.  It had gotten very late at that stage...

It's a bit Art GCSE for me...

And that's it with that naff Hammer horror/trashy paperback lettering.  Not convinced, but it's an alright start, and again helps with my internal visualising of these things.

There we go, some little bits of scribble.

Hope you are doing well over there and have a wonderful, relaxing weekend ahead of you.

Sending love as always

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