How to Make a Drawing Creepy

Traditional Art Week

Hey ! let me try to make something of HORROR! Wait ! But how?

That's a frequent question in everyone's mind who are initially starting up with horror art. So,what exactly horror and macabre is?Horror and macabre drawings are those , which usually consist of dark scenes composed of violence,gore,shadows,BLOOD!,WEAPONS Thrown in one's head!!! and even more!!! This type of art is mostly composed of the following topics:

• Violence, Gore and Blood
• Expressions and Shadows

So, to make everything systematic and organised , I'll divide this topic into these subtopics :

In Violence :

• Introduction
• Gore and addition of cuts,marks,scars
• Addition of Blood

In Expressions  :

• Introduction
  
• Main expressions
• Exceptions
• Shadowy shades

In Backgrounds  :

• Introduction
  
• Colour choice

Features

• Artist Features
  

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Violence :

Introduction :

Violence in horror art is frequently used and also almost every time brings about a dreary and unbearable feeling in our mind.So , it is a great tool for your horror art.Now , how to create this violence in your art? Of course you'll say "add some blood" or  "use scars!!!" or even "drop a sword in its head!!!" . So, to try out these samples practically, I've a tutorial for you :

To explain all these , I've a series of steps :

1. Made a blank sketch of a face on a fresh sheet of paper
   
2. Then made the required facial organs , i.e. eyes , nose etc.
3. Did shading around the eyes,bulges and bends of the face and the area of the neck,this promoted realism.
4. Dropped blood out of the eyes.Dropped them in an uneven manner, not in a straight path as it looks unnatural.
5. Did shading behind the stream of blood.
6. Then, made a reference line for the scar.
7. Made stitches and shade along the boundary, which shows dried blood on the edges.
8. Then pushed a weapon  in the head.
9. Made blood out side the emerging sharp edge of the sword.
10. Made a dull background ,  to create a dreary feeling.

This was what I had done , now let us understand the methods in deeper detail:

Gore and addition of cuts, marks and weapons :

Adding the weapon :

Adding scars :

Addition of Blood :

From the eyes :

To the end of the chin :

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Expressions and Shadows :

The expressions make a very important  part of a horror painting or sketch as if you make a mistake in the expressions and make them opposite, then the result will be completely different. To prevent this, you have to remember that in a horror painting the widely used expressions are sadness,dullness, fear, scare, terror, shock, anger, rage, envy, crying, pain, mysterious, misc. and demise. So, how to make them? I've
divided these expressions into these categories :

1. SADNESS : demise, pain, crying etc.
2. TEMPER : rage, envy etc.
3. SCARED : fear, terror, shock etc.
4. MISC. : mysterious expressions or poker face (expressionless face)

so here are the forms :

The picture made above by me is an example of the usage of expressions and a bit of blood, but what else can you see?what ? You mean you saw a smile? But how can a smiley face be horror, or be enough to scare you?Are you scared of clowns or jokers? Why do you get scared of their lovely big smile? Does it seem evil?YES! Everything in excess is an evil! and so is a smile! If you extend a smile very much,it will turn into something really horrible and scary! For eg:

So, taking care of drawings is an important task in horror!

Shadowy shades :

Did you observe in the examples of expressions,that near the eyes were greyish-black patches? What do they add? Yes the shadows of black and other dark colours bring up a nocturnal effect that's pretty scary and these effects can be used to enhance the scariness of a drawing or painting! For eg:

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Backgrounds :

How would you drawing look if it didn't have a background? More scary or less scary?Let's compare again with the same example as before:

So, did the one with the background appear more scary? Why? The answer is that because the picture without the background didn't have an equivalent contrast around itself, it appeared normal, but in the case of the background one, since it had a really contrasting response from behind, it appeared as a ghost appearing from darkness.

Colour Choices :

For having perfect backgrounds as per your sketch or painting, you first have to remember that warm colours don't make good backgrounds for horror art, instead use the hybrid shades like pale green, greyish blue or cold and dark colour shades like grey, dark blue and for painting the backgrounds on paper instead of using crayons, pencils or ball pens,use diluted mixes of the examples of colours given above! they make excellent shades!!!

Here are some examples of shade which you can use for backgrounds!

So I hope you are now clear by the shades which can be used to create the PERFECT HORROR sketch/painting/drawing etc.
and one last thing DON'T FORGET TO ADD RED!!!

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FEATURES :

I Hope after seeing all these features,you get an idea about what actually horror is!

Article written for projecteducate
by Tudalia-Hex

spanglerbuourproy.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.deviantart.com/tudalia-hex/journal/Beginners-Guide-To-Horror-in-Art-511670538

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