LICH KINGS

Hello.

I'm doing more works based on the Lich. The lich is also combined with the structures and insitutions of man, rigidity and altering the natural world. This allows for drawings with a greater emphasis on hard angles, symmetry, symbols and architecture-like geometry.

The bottom of this drawing is based on Infest's Slave LP, though the actual LP isn't that yellow. The middle half of the drawing uses quartz crystals as the basis for ruined buildings. Apart from the lich theme, Zoroastrian funeral rituals inspired the piece; large structures called Dakhma are built to house the dead as they decompose. This is done so that neither earth nor fire is polluted by the corpse, which is picked clean by vultures and rain.

It's actually a lot more complicated than that, but I'm an artist, not an anthropologist.

LICH

Hi.

This is a dodgy photograph of the latest drawing I've done. It's based around the D&D character class "Lich". A lich is a sorceror or king who is essentially a magically animated corpse, often they have traded their lives or body parts for magical knowledge and immortality. Not zombies.

The theme works well with what I'm doing, and lends itself to a lot of religious allegory, viscera, black and death metal references, and Noothgrush lyrics. If Noothgrush is reading this, let's work out a deal.

NEW WORK

Hi all, I'm totally not dead. I have however taken a lot of time to draw the largest stippling-only piece I've ever made. I probably won't be doing it again, it's really bad on the wrist.

The drawing was made for the American Black Metal band Ash Borer, for the rerelease of their first cassette. I'll be posting more information on the release itself when I have it handy. Ash Borer is a very good band whose musicianship and attention to detail will set them above other acts in time to come.

The drawing itself is based on Dore's The Tempest, or Back into the Tempest. I was planning to add staircases and bones and such, but there is a haunting, eerie quality to the original which deserves not to be spoiled with more details.

NEW WORK

This is the first in a series of drawings which are inspired by Durer's Apocalypse prints. Apocalypse is a word often misused in modern times, it literally means "lifting the veil", the apocalypse, supposedly, was a time when great truths would be unveiled. It has become synonymous with "end times" or "Armageddon".

Taking these ideas into account, and totally giving up on using the book of revelations for material, my series looks at ideas of utopia and dystopia, power and the environment. A lot of people forget that nature is awesome. If god created the heavens and the earth, then they should be worshipped above the bible, the instruction manual on who to kill and when. Without getting too pretentious here, the pieces place the natural world above human endeavours and creations.

There should be 8 to 12 of these, I can't decide on a really cool number.

ULSK

These are some rough drawings for a comic I hope to make one day, if I can figure out the variables. I talk about wizards a lot, Ulsk is a wizard who is always hooded. Ulsk is accompanied by a thief, named Thief. I've been reading a lot of Philippe Druillet, Moebius and Vaughn Bodē, especially his Cheech Wizard strip. If Ulsk coalesces into something simple and doable, it will be a sword and sorcery type strip with quests and temples and armies and magic. Basically something a person who grew up with D&D, Magic: The Gathering, The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy and various less famous versions of all of these things would try to make one day.

You may notice that Thief bears striking resemblance to a character in an earlier post.

I am working on "serious art" as well, it just isn't ready to photograph yet. Sometimes a line drawing that took twenty minutes to make can be more fulfilling than a drawing which took twenty days.

Edit: About a week after drawing this, I realize that Thief has DeForge eyes. Oops?

Logos

This is the first incarnation of a logo I'm probably going to use a few times in the years to come. The logo itself is a serpent devouring the sun. Thematically and stylistically, the logo is inspired by the untouchable Crass logo which Dave King originally made for Penny Rimbaud. That logo depicts several symbols associated with power, and to Crass, bad power: the swastika of the Nazis, the cross, elements of the Union Jack but also an ourobouros. The Crass logo is insanely perfect in its rotational symmetry and its ease in stencilling.

The reason behind my logo is to critique superstition; world myths began as a way of explaining natural phenomena (rain gods, wind gods, forest gods, lightning gods) and I see no reason not to put any of the major religions in the same category. After dozens of attempts at using and dismantling religious icons, I came upon this idea as a catch-all; irrational belief in any form is counterproductive and probably fear based.

The serpent in my logo was inspired by a Mayan relief from the 7th century, mostly in the look of the mouth.

The smaller symbol inside is a monogram, MAC, made to look like a moon over three mountains.

BLACK METAL

This is a rough draft of the logo for a band I'm in with Patrick Kyle.

Black metal logos are probably the best kinds of logos. Often symmetrical, they can be cheesy or indecipherable or ugly or completely abstract. Bands with horrible production and darker riffing tend to use scratchier, uglier logos. Bands with geometric, symmetrical logos are probably going to be newer, and American.

Being in a band is a good excuse to draw cool logos.