Count Dracula – My Favourite Monster

Hello friends,

Happy Thursday! I hope your week is going well so far. Mine has been OK with a few niggling health issues but at least the kitties are all much better.  The weather has turned cloudy and cold and one of the cats refuses to get out of bed before lunch time so I think she’s gone into hibernation mode lol.

today’s journal page . . .

Today’s spread is inspired by this week’s prompt over on Rain’s Thursday Art Date which is October Spooks – Villains!

I have this great fabric background for my page today – it’s full of classic movie monsters (or villains) like The Mummy, Frankenstein, The Wolfman and of course, my favourite, Count Dracula!  The fabric is called The Fright Monsters and was part of the Pleasures and Pastimes collection by Robert Kaufman, from a few years ago.

I could have just left this fabric the way it was since there’s plenty going on there lol but I wanted to add my favourite monster to it so I decided to paint on top of it.

I looked at the fabric piece and worked out that I could probably squeeze in Count Dracula on the left hand side, if I painted over the spooky castle since that’s repeated on the top right behind Frankenstein.  After measuring out the space, I did a quick sketch on some layout paper to practice and to get the size right, and then I used some white acrylic to block off the area where I wanted Dracula to go.

I started with pencil, went over it with black pen, then did the colouring and shading with Neocolour IIs and acrylic paint pens.

To help him stand out from the rest of the background, I gave him a fluorescent green aura.

As I mentioned above, the fabric is called The Fright Monsters, so I changed it to read The Right Monster, since for me, Dracula is always the right monster, and changed the yellow on the text to fluorescent green.

Christopher Lee has always been my favourite Dracula.  He used to scare the bejesus out of me when I was a kid.  I wasn’t allowed to watch scary horror movies when they came on TV, but sometimes I got to see the beginning if it started before bedtime.  But that was worse, as it was usually just enough time for Dracula to wake up and go on the rampage, so in my mind, as I tried to go to sleep, he was still at large!  It didn’t help that we had a dentist that looked just like him either!
Over the years I managed to get over my fear of scary monsters, vampires and Christopher Lee, and really enjoy all those, quite cheesy, Hammer Horror Dracula films.  I have even visited Bray, in Berkshire where the Hammer Studios used to be and saw the woods where they used to do the filming of the spooky black coach and black horses racing off to the castle before dawn. Hammer Studios stopped filming there in the 1970s but the studios have been reopened and the recent BBC mini series of Dracula (2019) had some scenes filmed there.  I have included some of my Hammer Horror Dracula DVDs above and one other, the classic Bela Lugosi Dracula from a few decades earlier.

If you need more October Spooks, check out Wednesday Addams, and Edgar Allan Poe – there’s a second Poe page coming up in a day or two.  Let me know what you think in the comments.   As always, thanks for reading!Ingredients
my handmade journal, watercolour paper, fabric, gel medium, Neocolour IIs, Pitt pens, black pen,

Challenges

Art Journal Journey – The Colours of October – October is looking very scary today with a hint of fluorescent green 🙂

LeighSBDesigns – 31 Days of Halloween Hop+Challenge 2021 – Day 28

Rain’s Thursday Art Date – October Spooks – Villains!

You might also like . . .

A Real House-Haunting, Broom-Riding, Cauldron-Stirring Witch

October 21, 2021

I Fell In Love With Melancholy

October 25, 2021

Evil Aunts

October 22, 2021

They Come To Gaze At The Moon, The Moon Gazes Back

October 19, 2021