The LIVING DEAD!

Ive been wanting to make a shirt for halloween for sometime. I wasnt a big monster fan as a kid but have been fascinated with the idea of the "living dead" since the first time I saw NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.

I took that fascination along with my early influences of skate culture and punk rock artwork and approached this project with a medical illustration style in mind, focusing on the realistic aspect of horror rather than the traditional blood and guts resulting in a grossly detailed study of a bloated zombie in various stages of decomposition with maggots eating their way from exposed (but in tact) brain to layers of skin, muscle and open throat..

Process: "Let the horror implant itself and find its way to paper"
I was truly disgusted by my own research and in working on this. Whenever I work on a project I usually create large folders filled with reference images, from the smallest details to anything I find interesting or relevant, with this project however, I couldn't bring myself to save most of these files!

I tried the typical approach but then decided to avoid the usual and expected horror movie references and instead used real photos as reference, initially searching on war casualties, homicide images and soon found certain sites that specialize in all matters of gore, from car crashes to blown apart limbs, gun shot wounds, immolation, truly disgusting images that turned my stomach and took hold of my head!

I would look at a handful of images and turn away and draw, the essence of disgustingness would work its way into my drawing, I could look at an image until I couldnt handle it, close my eyes and I could see it clear as day. As an example, after the first few nights of looking up maggots and rotting corpses (I wanted to see how they infest in stages or cycles) the images were so horrible that I would wake up in the middle of the night either feeling maggots crawling on me or in shock of the realization that I had been looking at real people who died in some horrific ways..but that is what I needed to get the realism I was after.. in the end, I was happy to finish this piece just to get away from the research material!

Drawing and Inking
I went big with this piece and as usual had a rough study on the side to try out different textures and strokes. The maggots were left with no detail, I knew I wanted to print those with glow in the dark so I left them open, also, it allows for good contrast and helps keep the illustion of movement. I used a 102nib, speedball ink and a winsor & Newton brush

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