Pen and ink drawing, comic strips and sketchbooks
I set myself the challenge to do an illustration-a-day over 27 days. The number of chapters in Bram Stoker’s novel. I had not read Dracula until now, thinking it dull and a bit old fashioned. I have seen most of the films, modern and old that carry the vampires name so there was something familiar and
reassuring about the imagery. The 1992 Bram Stoker's Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola is probably my favourite on film, but to this day the book is just as amazing. Sure it has over long, drawn-out dialogue, punctuated by frenetic action, strategically placed at the points in the book where you are
ready to give up, and genuinely disturbing bits that seem very modern to a twenty first century horror film enthusiast. For all its faults, and there are a few, it is a very entertaining bit of literature and it makes me feel, that for this novel at least, Bram Stoker knew exactly what he was doing.
BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA
DIARY COMICS
NEWS UPDATE
SKETCHBOOKS
“I have kept diary comics on and off for a few years, I used to self publish them but not so much now. Life passes far too quickly the older I get and diary comics are a great way of recording it.”
“Drawing work in progress. This will mainly involve working on a new comic strip written by Noel Hannan about a steam driven, WW1 robot on one last visit to the pub, to honour fallen comrades.”
“I am a true believer when it comes to the creative power of keeping a sketchbook. I do lapse and get caught up in real life and always regret it. The practice of doing something regularly is key.”
As I sketched the notes for Chapter 26 I noticed the word ‘repetition’ was appearing more often. The story runs out steam, taking two chapters to hammer the final point home, pun intended. Johnathan Harker and Lord Arthur bond on a boat trip, Petrof Skinsky gets his throat torn out and so on. A lot of telling through Mina Harkers’s psychic link with the Count, and not much else. Because of this the last two images did not get made, I enjoyed the exhilarating Chapters leading up to this but the anticlimax killed my desire to draw it any further.
