How To Make A Zombie (illustration, that is.)

I thought I would post a little crash course on the creative process of illustrating the cover for our 9th Anniversary Halloween issue of last year, featuring the legacy of Italian surrealist gore-god Lucio Fulci. To the horror crowd, the classic image of the maggot-faced zombe from Fulci’s blood-caked masterpiece of the same name (or Zombie 2, depending on where you live) is as much of an icon as Karloff’s monster in Frankenstein.

I’ve never posted a tutorial before of any kind so please bear with me. I hope it will shed a little light on how I got to the finished piece. I realize, of course, this may not be the way every artist works but that’s what makes the world pop. I hope you enjoy it and I’ll try and keep the technical jargan to a minimum.

Fig. 1: Before scanning it into the computer or cleaning it up, this is the finished drawing. I normally work in pencil on Beinfang 100% translucent marker paper, which is used mostly by graphic artists for brain-storming, marker renderings and quick sketches. Pencil takes to it great and I like the toothy texture, so I’ve stuck with it. After the drawing is done, I use graphic white paint, and a small brush to create the high lights and fix little mistakes. Using a brush over the pencil tends to give the drawing a more painted quality, something I find can be fun to achieve if your not painting in the traditional sense.
Depending on the job, an illustration can take anywhere from a couple of hours to a few days. In this case I estimate about 15-16 hours were spent just at this stage.

Fig. 2: The drawing is scanned as a Greyscale, .tif file, at 300 dpi (the very least required resolution for print, when someone says they need it hi-res, that’s what they’re talking about). Using Adobe Photoshop (on a mac) I’ll adjust the contrast, clean it up using the dodge and burn tools, eraser tool and the paintbrush tool. After much fudging around, I change the file setting to CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black) which is the standard colour breakdown for print (I encourage anyone reading this to learn the difference between CMYK and RGB. Google it, ’cause that’s a lesson on it’s own). Also, I’ve tinted the drawing an earthy tone to add more depth of colour and try and further the illusion that it’s not done with pencil. TIP! Use Apple U to open the Hue/Saturation pallette. Select the “colorize” option and slide around the hue and saturation bars until your satisfied. You can also adjust the colour by using Apple M and adjusting the CMYK.

Fig. 3: I make a new layer below the drawing. With the paint brush tool, I begin painting in the colours. This can take quite a while. Also, it may look really crude at first, but once you set the first layer of the drawing to multiply (found on the layer pallet under “normal”), it bleeds the drawing above into the coloured layer. By turning the mutliplied layer on and off during the process, I can see where the colours and tones need to be.

Fig. 4: Here’s the results when the drawing on top and the coloured layer beneath are merged.
Your zombie is almost complete!

Fig. 5: Time to figure out a background. If I haven’t pre-drawn one for it or one doesn’t exist, I’ll create something in photoshop using brushes and scanned in textures. In this case, I wanted the zombie to really jump from the page so I kept the background really simple. A deep red colour with some bright spots is used to contrast against the ghastly face of the zombie. I’ve added a very soft drop shadow behind it, to make him pop a bit more. It’s subtle, but it helps.

Fig. 6: Now that that the illustration is done, we need to add the Rue Morgue masthead and cover text. This can be a challenge all it’s own to get just right. The Rue Morgue logo was designed to always be inter-changeable, usually with the letters one colour and the moon another, just to stand out a bit more. To keep things simple, I kept the logo the same colour all the way across, but played more with the green textured background behind it. I wanted it to have a mossy, earthy feeling because that’s where the flesh-eater came from. An appropriate font is found to compliment the illustration (not kill it) and placed in a graphically pleasing manner. I won’t bore you with how you add the bar code, which you’ll notice is missing from the picture. Once it’s placed, a hi-res (you know the lingo now!) PDF is made and is fit to print.

That concludes my first tutorial. Thanks for reading.