Ack… Ack… Turn Back!

I’ve had plans for a long time to create very warped children’s stories and illustrate them. One of my favorite ideas was to chronicle the tale of a young boy who journeys into hell in order to reunite with his dead dog. The dog was hit by a car and the boy wakes up from a dream, sees glowing footprints and follows them through the forest by his house, down into a mysterious cave.

This image is from that story and is a deceased character who I imagine the boy interacting with in the byways of Hell. He warns the boy to turn around and return to the land of the living. I originally created this in Photoshop using a Wacom tablet to test out some some transparency techniques I had been working with. You can see them in how the water swirls around the floating corpse.