Artist Deanna Molinaro dreams up slightly troubling bedtime tales and publishes them both on her website in .pdf format as well as in limited edition hardcopies. Her website also has snaps of her deliciously demented sculptures and drawings.  Personally, I’m sending her some cash for a copy of “The Lonely Sea Monster.”
Category: Art
An art gallery of illustrations, comics, sketches, animations either based on nightmares or scary stuff
The artist Michael Paulus has used standard anatomical proportions to sketch out the skeletons that are implied by various classic cartoon characters. The effect is rather innocently eerie and bizarrely charming. My personal favorite is Charlie Brown whose grinning skull is downright unnerving.
http://michaelpaulus.com/gallery/v/character-Skeletons/
This guy, Dave Devries, takes the artwork of children and then paints realistic versions of the monsters they’ve envisioned. He’s published a book of the monsters and interviews with the children called Monster Engine: an experiment with children’s art. On the site is also a short movie where he demonstrates the process and describes some of his ambitions.
This Phantom of the Opera was the first monster model I completed as an adult. It’s a styrene plastic kit which means that it’s a bit of a challenge to assemble without encountering some unwanted gaps or jutting seams. I have some dental-sized rasps to even out the pieces that stick out. I used Squadron’s “Green Putty” gap filler for the gaps and a little extra fine sand paper to make everything smooth. I primered the kit with grey sandable primer, and boy howdy, shooting on a coat of primer REALLY reveals any surface flaws so I sanded more after that first coat.
Painting this kit was a blast since I finally had the patience of an adult, not to mention the ability to get the right materials. Acrylic paints are SO much easier to work with than the goopy enamels I used as a kid. Not to mention that hard, glossy sheen of the enamels is better suited to a hotrod than to a monster model. And another aspect of adult-level patience is that I looked at the model carefully before I assembled it and determined which parts should best be painted BEFORE they were assembled (the prisoner, the underside of the Phantom’s cloak…) I tried different techniques to make different areas of the kit feel like different materials, like dry brushing for highlights and washes for contrast. I sprayed a couple coats of flat lacquer on the model once the color was pretty much how I wanted it but then I brushed on a bit of high gloss lacquer to certain areas near the jail cell to make the stone look wet.
I only had memories of assembling a model as a kid, mostly of botching up something here or there, so I was really pleased if not amazed to watch this kit almost assemble itself.
Happy was the day I stumbled upon the dark surrealist digital imagery of Erlend Mork. Mork’s work places suggestive and stylized elements next to passages of utmost clarity, all layered and at times effaced with washes. I am not saying anything new to note that these key elements of artistic surrealism echo the internal logic of dreams. Mork’s darker fixations also link his subject matter to what we discuss on the Daily Nightmare.
A skeptic would say it’s all just Photoshop and I admit, some pieces are more effective than others. I’m unlikely to make a digital believer of someone in a few words but if you are so interested, look at these pieces in particular:
For me, the cello – an instrument I’ve played as a amateur for nearly 3 decades – is the wordless voice of my soul. It’s ethereal, melancholy, gutteral, lonesome, joyous, graceful…each in turn. This piece nicely illustrates at least one grouping of my mental ensemble.
Everything sounds more serious in German, n’est-ce pas? I hesitate to comment on this piece, “The Fool’s Dream” because it might reveal too much of my own psychology. But is that young man dutifully collecting the nightmares of others, putting in canning jars their jarring dreams? Is this like my project here? Am I then the fool?
The mass of erudition, piled in an unbelievable space with a surface like an old photograph. Whimsical perhaps but show this image to any scholar or better, a failed doctoral student and observe the weary smile creases at the edges of their eyes.
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Dark Gallery #5 – Model: “Lily Munster”
In just about every aspect, The Addams Family kicked the pants of The Munsters, except when it came to theme song. The Addams Family has an embarrassing below average theme song if for no other reason than it tries pass off “ooky” as a real word. In contrast, The Munsters has that wonderfully cool yet creepy Transylvanian surf music instrumental. I could listen to stuff like that all day long.
This model of Lily Munster is a cautionary tale. The original modeling comes from an Aurora Models set of the Munsters’ living room recast during the 90’s by Polar Lights. (Incidentally there’s a far FAR cooler model of Lily sculpted by the dearly departed Jim Fawkes of Fairbanx Models. Why, oh why didn’t I buy one of them when I had the chance?) I started with Lily. I lovingly painted and then dry brushed the creases in her dress — the trick with painting highlights on red fabric is to use scarlet because if you simply lighten the base color with white you’ll end up with pink and that’ll just make the fabric look faded. I under painted her necklace with black and touched it with silver to make it look deeply tarnished. I added individual streaks of grey and white to hair and light blue strands to her ball of yarn. I thought she was just about finished…
..Until I looked up some reference material.
Lily’s gown is very very clearly something lightly toned, my guess a baby blue satin. Red was entirely the wrong choice. What’s more, I could have remembered that if I had just stopped to think before I grabbed my brush. I could have stripped the piece and started over, or actually I could have probably just primered the thing and painted on top but in the end, I went out and bought a whole new kit. It only was around $25 or so. I would have been much more upset if it had been one of those $100 resin beauties
She’s not too big (maybe 3 or 4″) or too obtrusive so I keep her around at the corner of my shelf to remind me to double-check that color scheme BEFORE I crack out the brushes.
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Dark Gallery #4 – Model: “Angel Fink”
One of the Grim Gnome’s hobbies is to assemble and paint models of classic horror figures. This one is a little obscure and so deserves a little commentary. Her name is Angel Fink and she was designed by Big Daddy Roth. Roth was one of the key figures in the hot rod movement and he came up with the Rat Fink characters. Angel Fink, I gather, mixed up the special blend of fuel for the hot rods.
I just thought she was a rather cool, stylized “witch.” I made a little cauldron for her out of Super-Sculpy and sprayed a little of that expanding foam stuff inside the cauldron so it looks like she’s presiding over a boiling batch of goo. To contrast the red of her gown, I painted the goo a nice, sickeningly fluorescent green.
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Dark Gallery #3 – Giving Up the Ghost
OK one more illustration from my daughter. This one really blows me away. It’s a depiction of the moment of death, the moment when someone literally “gives up the ghost.” Her ghost here looks a lot like the ghost I posted in Gallery #1 but the context of it coming out of somebody’s wide open mouth makes it amazing. At least to me. I’m her father, of course.
Around the time when my daughter drew these sketches, we had a neighbor who was an artist. He saved scraps of art supplies for my daughter to play with. He claimed to see spirits and his contention was that my daughter also could see “them.” Of course when I asked her about this now she says “I have no idea what he was talking about.”
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Dark Gallery #2 – Scared Hair
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Dark Gallery #1 — Nepotism?
Why deny it? – the favoritism is OBVIOUS in my selections for the first entries to the Night Gallery. (Click on the thumbnails above to see larger versions. They’re EVEN BETTER than the small versions) These illustrations were done by my daughter several years ago on a rainy afternoon. Her artistic impulses needed just a little prodding so I suggested that she draw pictures of my Aurora monster models. Without so much as a second thought she sketched wonderful renditions of a human skeleton, Frankenstein’s monster, the Creature from the Black lagoon and many, many others. (She also sketched a “portrait” of her brother that consisted of a Playstation and a set of controllers.)
Where ever does she get her wit and talent?