The “Zombie Whisperer”???

Zombies are mindless animated corpses, operating strictly on the simple instinct to pursue and devour… no external force affects or influences their behavior… right?  Well what if something, or someONE, could?  What if some sinister figure had the ability to coordinate–to direct–the legions of the Undead?  How would that change the playing field?

So, I’d sketched up some ghoulies, dreamed up a hero and carved out a back-story for her–partially setting the stage for the overall story in a spontaneous fit of creative writing (don’t worry… that doesn’t happen often.)  So what next…? 

Well, I’m the kind of person who craves balance.  So once I’d defined the hero, it became important for me to come up with an Anti-Hero.  “Protagonist… meet Antagonist.  I’m sure you’ll hit it off famously.”

To be honest, I never did come up with quite as clear of an idea about who the Antagonist was, or where he came from.  Maybe I was being lazy, but I decided that he would at least start out as a complete mystery… and I figured I could sort out the rest if it ever became important. And knowing that I was doing this as a creative exercise, and never really planned to actually MAKE a movie out of it… I figured that was good enough.

The Antagonist as far as I did define him was a man… probably incredibly old, but with no appearance of physical decline… grim, but not unattractive… absolutely fearless and intimidating beyond belief.  In fact, I modeled the basic idea off of my memory of Stephen King’s ultimate villain Randall Flagg, from one of my very favorite books ‘The Stand.’

 Like I mentioned previously… my main goals in this series of drawings were:

1)  move quickly – don’t spend too much time on details
2)  experiment with framing
3)  work on color schemes to convey mood

On that score, I think I did well with this one.  Although, I’m not exactly crazy about the face, or the figures in the background (truthfully, I’m not even sure what they were supposed to be… but I’m calling them Zombies now… weird, lumpy Zombies) I do like the framing, the colors and the overall sense I get when looking at this sketch, so… I’ll call it a keeper.