Creepy Basement

So, this is another piece from the Groan Folks project.  The whole work is about revisiting the creepy places that you grow up experiencing and sometimes seeing them in a new light (and sometimes not).  Basements are creepy.  The basements I grew up with had pipes and exposed beams and rust and some mold and wooden benches and shelves and all kinds of gnarly stuff.  And there was never sufficient lighting, which did nothing but cause even creepier shadows to play on the walls and among the pipes.

The basements I know also had breaker boxes with deadly warnings inside them.  So, this is where I started.  From there, it became a game of playing with shadows. If there was an opportunity to place something creepy or visually confusing in the shadows then I made it happen.  Below is a detail of this piece that shows some of the shadow play, but I could have easily zoomed in on other parts of this.  There is a shadow behind the pipe on the left that actually ties in with another figure in another illustration in the same book.  There is also a shadow hiding in the window in the upper right hand corner.

Above I purposefully went with three creepy characteristics.  The first and easiest to see is the shadow of the pipe helping to blow out the candle.  It is easy for a crusty, rusty, old-timey pipe to have a face-like shadow, so that was easy.  The second is the face in the pipe itself, in the bottom right corner.  I tried to make a pair of eyes and a nose with keeping with the shading I was doing.  The third, I kind of did by accident.  The black, gooey dripping from the pipe (left) seemed to me to be human in shape, kind of upside-down human stick figures, so I went with it.  The shading in the background uses pencil on its side, blended multiple times.  I then did a rougher kind of shading on the pipe and used a kind of Edward Gorey style lines for the breaker box.