Ahhh! Monsters: September 2011

Welcome Ghouls and Ghoulettes to the great new blog Ahhh! Monsters,

So what is Ahhh! Monsters? Well that's the reaction you have when you see monsters you know "AHHH! MONSTERS." Well that sounded really good in my head anyway. What this is really going to be is a blog for my artwork featuring monsters.

Wait a second who are you? Well I am Kevin P. Johnson and I make art . . . now please stop interrupting so I can just tell you what's going on and we can start having some fun.


The Bride of Frankenstein after still photo of Elsa Lanchester 1935 Universal Pictures

A few months ago I decided to do some drawings of old horror movie characters using old photos from the 1930's. I did three of these The Bride of Frankenstein, Frankenstein's Monster and the Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954). Originally I thought the Creature was a lot older. I was really happy with two of the drawings and only the Creature wasn't working so well (I didn't finish him) but this left me wanting to do more drawings of monsters.

The classic monsters drawings were a bit outside my normal cartoony style of drawing but being that I worked from photographs a style change was to be expected. I liked what happened but you can still see the influence of "what I do" all over the images. After doing these I thought that I should do more monsters because I have always had a love the larger than life monsters from movies and comic books and I think people would enjoy seeing my renditions of famous monsters as well as making up my own crazy monsters.

I do have a list of different monsters and urban legend's to work from but I would love to hear from people about local monsters in the areas they are from. We've got the Honey Island Swamp Monster down in southern Louisiana and I will be doing a rendition of him for sure (He's pretty much Big Foot in the swamp). I won't be doing any slasher type guys because those are not fantasy monsters to me and reality based monsters are no fun for drawing right?

Frankenstein's Monster
after still photo of Boris Karloff
1931 Universal Pictures

Basically this blog will be a continuous flow of my artwork featuring monsters as we've already learned but I may also do movie, book and comic book reviews relating to monsters if time permits. I hope to update several times a week after the initial start up project runs its course.

What project? I knew you'd ask that.

The first project is for October, 2011 and will be 31 MONSTERS IN 31 DAYS. Now the pure way to do this will be to draw one monster each day for the entire month and that is what my intent will be. If I get behind the goal will still be to draw 31 monsters over the 31 day period. The monsters that I will draw for this have not been decided and are open to suggestion and I'll possibly be making up most of them as I go. At the very least I will be doing my interpretation of a monster that is well known but in my own special way. I did a werewolf drawing as practice for this post (see below) to give you an idea of what to expect from me (I messed up his ear) but I may also do more images dealing with old photographs of monsters.

If the 31 Monsters in 31 days project goes well I may publish all of the drawings in a comic book format/sketchbook that you will be able to purchase. And I will make prints of any drawing that appears on this site unless otherwise noted. I will probably set up a page to order prints from once I get things going.

So are you ready to start seeing some silly, crazy, scary, fun monsters? Just say yes so we can get on with this.

Thank you very much for entertaining this silly idea I had,
Kevin P. Johnson

Creature From The Black Lagoon
after still photo
1954 Universal Pictures

Friday, September 30, 2011

Welcome to Ahhh! Monsters