After doing a few doodles of fungi zombies I wanted to draw some more finished zombie designs for my comic. I wanted to sketch them and do black line art but I found that using a pen over my blue pencil usually clogs up the pen and ruins the pen. So I tried a different approach and took inspiration from my work using the lightbox. I sketched on my usual sketchbook paper and then layered over a thin Layout Paper that would allow me to see the sketch marks through the paper.
I used a mixture of gel pen and Pentel brush pen. And I LOVE IT! The brush pen is something that Ceri introduced me to and I have been practicing with it in my little observational book I take everywhere. It can do really thin lines all the way to big black areas, so I create a lot of contrast by adding lots of dark.
I've drawn the zombies with patches of fungi on them, the patches are round and I imagine them to have the texture of curdled milk blobs. The protruding blobs can create an interesting silhouettes that are unsettling, from afar the zombie might look like they have a huge head or a huge hunchback.
I also found that on the first couple pages of zombie drawings I had only drawn men. :| Which is not inclusive and goes against everything I wrote for the visual culture project (all about the representation of women in horror). So on the next page I settled on fixing this issue and drew lots of female zombies, this also got me thinking about all the different body types that I should show in my comic.
This is also a good place to mention the nakedness of my zombies. I want the reader to be a bit unsettled and uncomfortable with the zombies and I thought them being naked would be a good way to do that, I also thought that its a good way to nod to how long the apocalypse has been going for (a while) and could also hint to the zombie ant fungi and the zombies needing the optimal conditions to grow and spread fungi (which would be to have no clothes covering the skin where the fungi is growing all over them).
