I have been busy with things of late but this morning I felt that I've neglected my sketch journal for too long and needed to make at least a quick entry.

These days I have been in the mood for a bit of the grotesque, and Szaltax provided the inspiration for this doodle. I have a feeling I'll be using more of the Tortured Souls 2 action figures to inspire sketches and character designs later. Several of them are just a bit too horrific in design for me to fully appreciate, yet even those qualities can be worthwhile in the right light. And some of them are quite beautiful in their own haunting ways. There's room even in the most pained expressions and anatomical disfigurements for beautiful shapes and forms, if you aren't, first, too disgusted to see them. It isn't, for me, about enjoying suffering, but to be able to see monsters as beautiful for their own unique features. An interest in anatomy, and unusual reinterpretations of such, also helps.

Another minor contributing factor could have been watching a movie like 28 Days Later. One of the most intelligent movies I've seen in the theaters in quite a while, it had elements of horror but was really using monsters (who were once human, and some still human) to examine facets of our humanity. By the same token, the fantastic and grotesque can sometimes reveal things about our own nature as human beings. Vampires, Werewolves, Zombies, and other monsters often work as an outward expression of fears, desires, and qualities that lurk within us and our society. While they may not exist, they can act as mirrors to reflect aspects of human nature and give us a means to more easily examine things about ourselves that we fear the most.