I finished up my last Sharpie drawing around the beginning of October 2023, and didn't have another commission drawing lined up. October was heading in, leading up to Halloween, so I decided it would be cool to draw a "Halloween drawing." My first thought was to draw Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, and the unofficial Queen of Halloween. But then I thought, 1) I don't know if anyone would want to buy my drawing of her. My drawings take so long, around 40 to 45 hours of drawing each, spread over two to three weeks, that I try sell them, to help me survive, day to day. Being a homeless working artist (with no work history after my taxi driving years), I can't find a "real job" today that would pay my rent. So I simply need to try and sell every drawing to get buy. Artists aren't supposed to say that, but it's my reality. There's still this thing in art that artists are supposed to act like money doesn't exist. Screw that. We all have bills to pay, even at my level of living. Besides most artists have not actually sold 100 original pieces that takes two to three weeks to finish, I have. 2) With all of Elvira's cleavage in view, no wife would let a guy keep my Elvira drawing up all year 'round, and I didn't know if anyone would want to pay a couple hundred bucks for a Halloween decoration. So I gave up on drawing Elvira. She's amazing, Elvira the character, and Cassandra, the woman behind the character.
Then I started thinking, "OK, what is REALLY scary?" We all see the fake witches, ghosts, ghouls, zombies, werewolves, and all that kind of stuff, all through October, and it's no big deal." In addition, I needed something that would be interesting visually, something worth drawing. What popped into head then was this crazy cemetery I used to go to when I lived in Winston-Salem, NC. It's right on the edge of downtown, where I used to hang out every day when I lived there, usually going to the library. The cemetery started with the Moravian "God's Acre" graveyard in Old Salem, the historical part of Salem, and a big tourist attraction. Salem, NC was founded in 1766, so it's an old cemetery. The Winston cemetery apparently began right next to it, part of it built into small hills. Winston, the industrial city built on the tobacco and textile industries, began in 1849. R.J. Reynolds, the company, was founded, and is still headquartered there. R.J. Reynolds, the man, is actually buried in this cemetery I'm talking about. It is the craziest, most medieval looking American cemetery I've ever seen.
So then my thinking went to the cool old crypts and abandoned churches. I thought of drawing either a dark interior of a creepy looking abandoned church, or a really cool looking crypt, like those in the photo above, could look really cool and Halloweenish. Something with a lot of shadows. At that point, I started looking on the internet for cool looking crypts and spooky looking abandoned churches. While I was doing that search for cool photos to work from, these graveyard statue photos came up in the searches. Like these below.
I loved these cemetery statues of sad angels. The poses were depressed and they were amazing sculptures. Dark, a little creepy, and, best of all, lots of shades and shadows. Then I started thinking, "OK, what theme best goes with these, for a drawing. What is most scary in life? What would make an angel sad? The idea came to me, "regrets." We all meet death at some point, and the scariest thing I could think of would be to be lying on your deathbed with a whole bunch of regrets of the things you did in life. Or worse, all the things you didn't do that you really wanted to do. So that top angel, and the theme of regrets, became the idea behind this drawing. At that point, I didn't know how well a stone sculpture of an angel, or the out-of-focus background with questions of possible regrets, would work with my Sharpie style. This drawing is one of my experiments. "Hey, I wonder if this will work? Or if I'll spend 45 hours and it will suck? So I started drawing.
Over the last few weeks, the stuff I do to survive day to day took more time than usual, so I slowed down on the drawing. But I finally finished it today. As the artist, I really like how the angel turned out, I don't know if there's 50 shades of gray in this drawing but I think there's at least 43 shades. The background doesn't look as cool as I hoped. I don't hate it, but don't totally love it either. That's just my take on this experimental drawing project. I definitely want to draw some more cool sculptures at some point. In fact, I started a "Sculptures: Shadows are Magic" board on Pinterest, collecting photos of other ones I really like.
The drawing at the top is the end result of my Halloween drawing experiment. Let me know on Facebook or Twitter what you think.
I'm doing a lot of writing these days on a New platform designed specifically for writers, called Substack. I'm writing mostly about creativity, creative scenes, art, writing, and some futurist and economics stuff, too, once in a while. Check it out:
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