Scared Ghoul

Losely based on a Oil on canvas I have hanging on the wall, that I did on my teens.

Still playing with colours and materials :)

More to come next week,

Torradas

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Well, Monday will be "official update day" for some time now - this because I can only find time to do some drawing on Sunday...

This is just an experiment of layering different materials and colours.

One more to come today.

Cheers,
Torradas

Never trust a woman with bat wings and a big sword.

Don´t say you haven´t been warned :D

More to come.

"Comics" Style"! :)

Finally, some time spent with my new pen tablet, which I have not fully enjoyed for some weeks now.

I´m still experimenting, and I went "Comics-style" on this one.

More to come from this latest session.

Cheers,
Torradas

First delvings with my new WACOM pen tablet

I´ve spent the last few hours getting the "hang" of it - after about 1 hour installing Bluetooth Drivers, Wacom Drivers, and Corel Software.
The pen is quite intuitive, and I managed to get some presentable drawings done pretty quick :)
I produced some test pieces - but wasn´t quite happy with some colours I did, so I´ll post a black & white drawing I did to test the precision of the Wacom Graphire. I was quite happy with the result :) I can identify my free-hand technique much better than with the ones I did previously with the mouse... of course. :)

I do Miniature Wargaming, and for inspiration I had some 15mm Teppô (that´s rifle) Ashigaru (that´s the lowest ranks of Samurai armies in the "Sengoku Jidai Period" - AKA "The Warring States Period" - Circa 1400´s). Follow the links if you´re in to that sort of thing ;).
So it´s a Teppô Ashigaru -but with a twist - I gave him a futuristic sci-fi rifle :D.
The symbols on his banner mark him as a member of the Takeda Clan. Click the picture to get a full-resolution version. Blogspot´s compression blurs it up more than a little.



I can´t begin to say how lucky I am that I am now a proud owner of this pen tablet. I feel like a kid drawing in the math class all over again! :D

My friends pitched in...

...at my birthday and got me a beautiful 2000dpi, 512 pressure lvl sensitive, A5 WACOM Graphire4 Bluetooth... :D


I´m beyond myself with happiness :D

I have to overcome a small hurdle though - gotta buy me a USB->Bluetooth dongle today, and I hope to be "at it" tonight. Expect updates in the coming days :)

Thanks to everyone that pitched in - I hope I can draw a caricature of each and everyone of you (and I do have a list... :D)

Cheers,
Torradas

Help Torradas get a WACOM fund :)

I started a partnership with the good folks at Printshop.
So now you can have my blog pictures on a T-shirt, Coffee Cup, mouse mat, etc - of your choice :)

I will integrate the shop with this site so that it becomes readily available.

Meanwhile, the link is:

Loja Online da MeiaTorrada

Hope to have some updates soon,
Torradas

We have such sights to show you...

Pinhead, from Hellraiser - a small tribute to an everlasting Icon of the Horror Genre.

The Demons that come and reward with pain your solving of the Lament Configuration seem to be a warning to stave the natural Human quality of curiosity. Will we ever delve to far in our quest for knowledge?

The One that cannot be named.

The One That Cannot be named in the shape of one of his avatars - The King in Yellow.

Small "Cthulhian" Quiz: Who is "The One That cannot be named"?

Beware that if you name him, he might come :D

I´m quite satisfied with the overall dark, decadent look with which this one came out. Looks to me just what he is - a maddened king slumping in his throne. He could well be dead for all we can see - or is he just waiting?

The symbol floating above the figure is the Yellow Sign
I have put my sanity at risk by drawing the Yellow Sign - all my future actions are now controled by the King in Yellow ;)

Roll your Cthulhu RPG Sanity Checks! :D

The Black Goat in The Woods with a Thousand Young

On a roll to depict the Cthulhu Mythos entities, I give you Shub-Niggurath. Although described as a "miasmic mass of tentacles" and a "cloudy mass", the epithet of "Black Goat" always burned a definite image in my mind, image which served as basis for the above drawing.

Apparently, according to the entry in Wikipedia, one Rodolfo Ferraresi wrote an essay ("The Question of Shub-Niggurath") in which he defends that Shub-Niggurath and the Black Goat are in fact two separate entities.

Now that I´m on a roll, Ill try and go through the majority of the Cthulhu Mythos. I do take requests :D

Crawling Chaos

Prompted by Julião I took up is suggestion of tackling my depiction of Nyarlathotep.

Talk about leaving it open to imagination! - Nyarlathotep is supposed to have 1000 shapes!

I read wikipedia´s entry on this Outer God and instead of following by letter some of the aspects of Nyarlathotep in the list I read it diagonally and till I had the gist of it.

This Dark, tentacled, multi-mouthed female was the end result, with which I was quite happy. I quite like the effect of the swirling Chaos in the backdrop - kind of looks like the veiny, translucid, inside of some organ.

Still, all done with GIMP, a mouse, and a hand I had to shake once in a while to avoid cramps :P

It´s been a bit slow...

Cheers,

A surge of work combined with vacations as led me to be astray from the drawing board for quite some time now...

However, you can expect new work to be put up during the next days :)

Current project (by request): Nyarlathotep :)

Torradas

Psycho-cherubin-beasty thinguie

Another one of the 10 minutes sketches done with a WACOM pen. Vaguely inspired (at least initially, the it went wild) by a good friend of mine (you know who you are... :D). A flying evil cherub with a big gun about to open a can of whoopass on someone. He ain´t no cupid.

Grrrr... get off my stinking face!

On the recent occasion of a good friend´s birthday (Paneum) I had a real treat: Using his WACOM pen. It took some getting used to, and this is one of the sketches that turned up from that brief (sigh...) session.

Ithaqua - The Cold Death

Still in the Cthulhu Mythos vein, I present you Ithaqua - the Cold Death.

Here shown in 1:100 scale :D

He comes in the middle of a snow storm to snuff the warmth out of the world. If you ever roleplay "Call of Cthulhu" RPG, and you spot one of these across a snowy plain, run like hell.

Squid Ship concept

A spaceship I recurrently have used in my drawings for about 15 years now. The shape haunts me. It look so streamlined and beautiful to me - only recently have I realized it has a very "fishy" look to it - hence "Squid" ship. I remember as a kid having all kinds of versions of this ship (as kids do): freighters, capitol ships, small fighters, scouts, etc...

Might be putting up some drawings in the future based on this concept.

satanspawnthecacodaemon!

If there is or ever were daemons, I´ll bet they would look like this. The cliché red with horns and tail doesn´t scare anyone anymore. I named it cacodaemon because while I drew this I kept hearing "Satan Spawn the Cacodaemon" from Deicide in my mind. It stopped now. :D

Unholy Necronomicon Priest

Sure am in a Pulp kind of mood.

Just drawn up a Necronomicon-toting Zombie Priest from Hell. Put´s me in the mood to cook up a "Call of Cthulhu" RPG, but the thought vanishes as soon as it came as I realize I have no time for RPG campaigns in my schedule... :P

Cya,
Torradas

PS.: The "zombie" link goes to Rob Zombie´s band, Rob manages to be both one of my favourite artists and one of my favourite musicians - be sure to check it out.

Speaking of Lovecraft...

Here´s a deep one fresh off the pond.

Thinking of deep-ones always reminds me of two things:
- Roleplaying Call of Cthulhu from Chaosium
- "The Thing that Should not Be" from Metallica back when they had long hair. "Hybrid Children watch the sea..." :D

Check out the rest of the lyrics

Still all done with GIMP with nothing but a mouse and some coffee :)

Rare Ethiopian Nippled Toad

I might not be many things (Im not a pot, or a flashlight, or a printer - just to name a few) but I sure am prolific. This blog is about publishing stuff I do on an impulse and without much forethought.
When I sketch I let the sketch evolve all on it´s own without much carefull consideration. It´s almost as if the hand is moving on it´s on accord as the my thought is somewhere else (not poetic in any way - I´m thinking what I´ll have for dinner, thinking about DVD´s I should buy - just really mundane stuff).
Sometimes I finish and look down and think: "Well, that´s odd...". This is one of those cases.
If you squint real hard you can probably make out a shape of a toad. You might be surprised that this particular toad has nipples. Maybe it´s not a toad - maybe it´s a Lovecraftian Deep One.

GIMP

I´ve been playing around with GIMP - a freeware image editor.

As I´m just an amateur artist, and have no money left from my other hobbies I´m trying out GIMP (as opposed to being restricted do mspaint :P).

I´ve just installed it and made a 5 minute sketch that ended up looking like the bastard child of the Che Guevara Icon and a Zombie.

Gotta save me some money for a Wacom - drawing with a mouse has it´s limitations...

Cya,
Torradas

Heyas

First things first. Im this guy here:
Don´t ask me how my glasses stay up without ears and nose...

I created this blog so that I can have someplace where I can put my sketches up. It could evolve into something else - I´ll just have to wait and see.

Cya,
Torradas