Tonight, after travelling for several days, I decided I’d kick back with a little old school photoshop illustration action, based on some notes I left myself before leaving last week. Here is what I came up with:

I think it’s pretty sweet. It’s kind of a combination of a few different styles I’ve been working with on and off, as well as some madness which I just sort of discovered tonight as I was doing it. Photoshop’s one of those things where sometimes if you step away from it for a while, you’re better at it than you were before. Like maybe your brain leaps ahead a few paces while you’re thinking about other things.

Whatever the cause, I’m pretty excited about it. This picture fits into my sort of saga that I’m halfway-building for a kids’ book (or series of books) about travelling through hell, and demons and stuff. Mainly because I think that’s a great idea for a kids book. I want it to be especially weird and creepy, because I think kids would like that. If nothing else, I like it. So, nuts to what kids think…

But anyway, I was also thinking it would be cool to do like updated Dr. Seuss type stuff. Dr. Seuss always freaked me the fuck out as a kid. I never had any of his books, but whenever I encountered them (which oddly enough seems to have usually happened at the doctor or dentist’s office), they had a spooky magic quality to them that I hated. I mean, I can remember the way it physically felt to even touch those books as a kid. The way the covers felt, the pages. Totally weird. I don’t know much about Dr. Seuss though…

The other cool idea I just had was to put together a version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead for children. That’s one of those books which is supposed to help guide souls after they die past a variety of threshold guardians and metaphysical states into a new bodily incarnation. Not only is that a creepy subject, but it’s especially creepy to make things for kids with the intention of it helping them to die. But hey, everybody dies. Sometimes even kids. If nothing else, illustrating it would probably be pretty intense. Plus I would want to re-write and simplify the text, of course. I wonder if the copyright for it is in the public domain… I bet it is, since it’s a traditional sacred text. I’ll have to look into that. This might be a good project to put on the back burner for a later date.

1. Tibetan Book of the Dead (Amazon)
2. Literature and Art collection on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (from the University of Virginia Library)
3. An overview of the Tibetan Book of the Dead from a drug-friendly website (People also talk about how it can be used as a guide for certain types of psychedelic travelling)
4. Dr. Seuss’s Seussville
5. The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss (book of his personal not-for-publication art)
6. Dr. Seuss’s Political Cartoons