October has a funny effect on me. I think it's the suddenly shorter days. This is a piece for a proposal I did with Brett Alexander Savory. If you don't know his work you should really seek it out. It's amazing. He writes horror and I'm usually not effected by horror but his stuff is really, really creepy. I tried something different with this piece, painting mostly in watercolour washes and pasting lots of photographic reference on to it in Photoshop. Brett is also an editor at Scholastic and i got my contract with his help. Funny story how I met him. I was standing around after my signing at the Toronto Book Expo waiting to meet the designer on the Hank book when a woman approached me asking if I'd like a book signed. It looked good and had lots of nice comments on the back cover from very famous horror writers so I decided to read it and get it signed. I met Brett very briefly as he signed it and gave him my card( always carry business cards!) and he contacted me a few days later when I was in Montreal to tell me me he liked my work. I read his book, In And Down, on the train ride back to Halifax ( an almost 20 hour train ride ) and was blown away by it. I'd never read such a rich complex, visually beautiful horror novel. It really gave me a new appreciation for the genre which I loved as a kid.
Anyway, more on this later, I thought I'd share a bit of it with you now.
