Hey, gang- back with another Monster Monday art blog post. This one is about my most recent airbrushed monsterpiece painting of Bela Lugosi as Dracula!
Yep, you heard me right. I finally airbrushed another painting. It’s probably been since just before the pandemic that I’ve airbrushed any paintings, and I did this large one above for my “It’s Good To Be Bad: Monster Portraits Of Villainy” art show back when I was still working at the tombstone company, and that’s been close to 15yrs ago now..!
I really wanted to have one of my airbrushed monsterpieces in this year’s Monster Market in October. This will be the third one I’ve been a part of.
The Monster Market is a holiday pop-up shop that happens in October for a week in Memphis. This year it’ll be downtown at The Medicine Factory.
I’ll have lots of my art for sale there including some “Scared Silly” and monsterpiece original art and print prints, “BATS” trading cards, stickers, sketchcards, sketchcovers, and more this year.
The weather around here has been great this last week, and I had a couple blank canvases so I set up outside to paint this younger version of Bela (my other painting was from “Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein“).
Since the garage still hasn’t been cleaned out I set up on the back patio to paint. Before I painted I used my projector inside to crop the reference photo and get a quick out line in pencil and a little bit of Sharpie around some of the solid black areas to paint. I don’t do a lot of details when doing the initial sketch on the canvas. Pencil can blow off and Sharpie can bleed through if you’re not careful, so I try to use the projector to get the cropping of the composition right and get down some simple reference points.
My bigger bottle of black had been sitting in the garage for waaaaay too long. Luckily I had a smaller bottle in my tote of acrylic paints inside the house. Had to slide by The Art Center to pick up more black and white. I actually bought my Artograph Super AG 100 opaque projector at The Art Center almost 4oyrs ago. It wasn’t cheap (around $200 at the time), but I’ve definitely gotten my money out of it! Projectors can go for upwards of several hundred to over a thousand dollars new, and I still see some used on eBay for $100-200. It’s definitely one of the tools I’m glad I picked up when I did. No idea how much time it’s saved me over the years, especially back during my mall Christmas days, painting murals, and doing my airbrushed monsterpiece art shows.
I could tell I was definitely rusty and this new Paasche VL 3 airbrush hadn’t been broken in yet. Since it wasn’t really humid and I was lazy I didn’t add my moisture trap to my new Craftsman “pancake” tank compressor. I just didn’t take the time to go dig it out of the garage and hook it up. I immediately made a rookie mistake and “caterpillar’d” my first brush stroke (see photo above). I had a bit more moisture problems when it got a bit drizzly out one day. This wasn’t going to be easy…
I was able to get the solid black areas filled in without too much cussin’ and fussin’. I used Createx acrylic airbrush paint that I had on hand, well- one small bottle I had left. After I picked up some new black and white I then mixed up a medium grey and filled in the background and started working on some shadow details.
Once the shadows had been worked in I used some of the new white to start painting the highlights and blending the shadow areas. I had a bit of a problem with hand eye coordination and judging how close I needed the gun to be. It took a bit to get the hang of it again.
Then it was just going back and forth between the black, white, and grey to tighten up the portrait. I also decided to mix a darker grey when my new glass bottles arrived. I really needed some new ones and found some on sale at Amazon and had them delivered the next day.
Our patio is kinda small, so I did one of my cardinal sins- I didn’t step back several feet and take a look, or take a pic with my phone and look at it. That’ll show you problems with your drawing. The details don’t matter if the drawing is off, and stepping back to “see the big picture” is crucial.
Something kept bothering me about the painting and after bringing it in for the night I realized the left side of the face/hairline (his right) was off. It was a bit too wide and his ear shape was quite right either.
I had to go back with the grey and basically give his hair a trim and shape up his ear. The original reference photo was taken as a slight angle, and my drawing was off just a very tiny amount, but it was by just enough to matter and had to be fixed. Luckily it was in an area that was easy to fix!
That’s not always the case, and I had a few problems here and there that gave me fits. Sometimes it was the new brush fighting me, sometimes it was the water condensing in the tank (it was wet and rainy one day), sometimes the paint would dry on the tip, other times it was me- either just being out of practice, my hands cramping, bad hand/eye coordination, or just not having the feel for it like I used to. I continued on with going back and forth with the black, white, and greys. I hate blaming it on the new brush, but the design has changed a bit- the trigger and tip have been redesigned since my last one a few years ago. I’m hoping I can get used to it, or switch out the trigger top and front tip with one of my older guns. I’ve got a graveyard of airbrush parts I’ve collected from over the years. I’ve been painting professionally off/on since 1986..!
Some of the problems I experienced on this painting were with lines like his medallion and his eyes. It was tricky to get those long thin black lines against the white shirt without veering off to one side or having a lot of overspray or caterpillar effect from too much paint or water in the lines (always use a moisture trap, especially in humid conditions). My hands were shaky and my trigger finger is a bit arthritic these days. turning the painting to where you can go side to side helps, as well as rotating your body and not just your hands, wrists, or arms.
Another problem was that the eyes just weren’t having the “life” in them I wanted. One eye is normal and the other is open very wide, so it was tricky to make them look like they belonged in the same head. I had to redo them a few times before finally being done enough to finally put in the white highlights. It’s funny how much a difference just a couple white dots in the right place can bring a portrait to life!
I also had trouble with wanting to overwork the painting and not leaving things alone that I probably should have. And of course I’d goof and have to fix it which caused this painting to drag on and on and my cursing to continue.
Finally it was time to call it finished and sign the dang thing. Signing always makes me nervous. It’s the last step and if you goof in the wrong spot it can be hard to fix. Unfortunately I just didn’t have the finger control to pull off an airbrushed signature, so I painted over it with some black, let it sit overnight, and then the next day I used a grey acrylic paint pen to sign it. I sprayed the whole painting (including top/sides) with some Krylon Workable Spray Fixative, let it dry, flip the painting upside down and sprayed it again along with the bottom. I also put some eye hooks and hanging wire on the back to make it easier for the folks at Monster Market to hang this monsterpiece.
I dropped off the Drac painting and the rest of my monsterpieces to Marshall Arts yesterday for the Monster Market. I did a quick interview with the head monster maker Lauren Holtermann (aka “Holtermonster“) for my podcast “Drawing Funny“, and I got interviewed for some future social media posts. Got to see a lot of the art that will be hanging at this year’s market at The Medicine Factory downtown.
Oh, and speaking of monsterpieces and hanging, I’ll be working on at least one more airbrushed painting to go in the MSCA/Mid-South Cartoonists Association‘s “Drawn Of The Dead” art show this October out at Germantown Community Theatre.
The group art show will run alongside the GCT’s presentation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, performances go from October 24th-November 2nd.
I’ll also be set up at this year’s Memphis Comic Expo/DonnieCon on September 13th & 14th at the Memphis Sports & Event Center in midtown, and at the MSCA table for the Memphis Comic & Fantasy Con on November 1st– aka “The Day of the Dead” at the Memphis Hilton out east.
Hope to see you out there!
Lin
Monster Market 2025
October 10-16, 2025
The Medicine Factory
85 Virginia Ave W
Memphis, Tennessee (downtown)
Opening Night Party
Friday, October 10, 2025
5:00PM-10:00PM