Tales of the Drawing Board.

I've been doing a few illustrations for some of the Tales of the.. projects. I hope everyone's been checking out the multimedia art showcase for Northern Irish creators, and now that our first theme; "Tales of the Cthulhu Quarter" has just wrapped up, I thought I'd show some of the work in progress over here.

Just posted this week was a very funny and romantic serenade to Cthulhu. After I'd heard Andrew Croskery's draft of the song I thought it would be nice to include a faux single cover to go along with the finished recording by The Party Band (Reggie Chamberlain King and Malachy Costello)

Here's the visual thought process from doodle to finished piece:

Check out the song here here

A couple of weeks previously I illustrated a frame for a Lovecraftian themed verse by Craig Smith. I took a little shortcut on this one and just drew half the frame. It just took a few lines in the middle to join up the copied and flipped halves to make one symmetrical piece.

Check out the full size readable image here

On the site there's also a Cthulhu comic from a few weeks ago and another unrelated comic coming up this Sunday that I didn't really have much of a creative hand in, so if you have an interest in comics you should keep up with the site, or subscribe to the RSS feed. I'm hoping to do a strip for the site eventually myself...

Tales of The...

On April 4th myself and a few other creative types are launching the website Talesofthe.com. The plan is to be an online weekly blog-style anthology incorporating all types of creative media and a platform for N.Ireland creators to showcase film, artwork, prose, audio and just about any other type of creative endeavour you can think of.

A new piece will be published every Sunday and similar in style to “Tales of the Crypt“, “Tales of the Unexpected”, or “Tales of insert term here” we're creating exciting fiction, without being tied to any particular genre. We're going to have the odd themes, and April kicks off with 'Tales of the Cthulhu Quarter' (a pun on Belfast's Cathedral Quarter), but for the most part creators and collaborators have free reign to create and share whatever they want.

This sort of grew out of the comic book creators meeting we have in the Garrick every week month and the love of different media the group had. Its grown a little since then and hopefully will continue to do so as the site launches.

The first theme features a radioplay-style podcast, a comic, prose, an original painting, a short film and a couple of accompanying short essays, so if you want to see what a group of N. Ireland creators come up with in their spare time you could do worse than to bookmark Talesofthe.com.

The above image is the logo I designed for the project so technically this post features a bit of my art, but there'll be a return to some proper stuff next week...