The Vampire Girl Next Door
Eager to try some new digital brushes on a monster sketch, Michelle and I asked for suggestions. Our friends in Patreon nudged us toward 1985’s Fright Night. The horror/comedy tells the story of Charley Brewster, a teenage boy who discovers a vampire has moved into the vacant house next door, and he has dark designs on Charley’s girlfriend, Amy. Honestly, just a creepy neighbor in his forties eyeing up a 16-year old girl would be enough to get the police involved today, but this was 1985 and even a string of dead escorts didn’t rouse much suspicion.
The most difficult part of this doodle was choosing from the many monsters featured in the movie. There are vampires of all forms; human, wolf, bat — even a malevolent day-walking familiar with carpentry skills. But if it were me trapped in that creepy house next door with monsters stalking me? Last thing I’d want to square off against is an angry girlfriend with the mouth of a crocodile and a taste for blood. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the situation Charley finds himself in.
The best part of doing these monster movie sketches is the research. Michelle and I block out a couple of hours, toss in a creepy movie, and take it all in. We jot down some notes, I do some loose sketches, then we talk about the film as I work out the drawing.
As usual, I penciled the roughs in Clip Studio Paint. It’s not that blue pencil roughs can’t be done in Affinity, but Clip Studio has an intuitive ‘rotate canvas’ keyboard shortcut that makes drawing and sketching feel natural.
I experimented with a few different Rusty Nib brushes for these inks. Some smooth, some scratchy, some textured. Getting to know these new tools is one of the main reasons I try to do these digital monster sketches as often as time allows. Good practice. But a good deal of the motivation is knowing that for every monster sketch I crank out, Michelle and I will have the opportunity to stream some new horror, or dig through some classic monster movies for a re-watch.
The color work was done in Affinity, mostly using the standard, on-board brushes that come with the app. But for the background wash and some elements of the figures, I also tried some new watercolor brushes from True Grit Texture Supply.
Like other digital watercolor brushes, these go down in multiply mode, creating a layering or glazing effect that attempts to mimic real watercolors. But they're new to me, and I'll have to experiment with them a lot more to achieve the feel of true, natural media.
Overall, as a test run of the new ink and watercolor brushes, this experiment feels like a success. I had so much fun drawing Charley and his vampire girlfriend, that I did an entire second illustration of Charley’s best friend, Evil Ed, for our Patreon members.
If you’d like to see me work through the Evil Ed sketch, or learn more about the brushes I used for these drawings, you can visit our Patreon. And if you’d like to listen to Michelle and I gab about Fright Night and process while I draw a vampire girl, you can watch that video at the link below.