Although Halloween is 204 days away, I have been working on a new Halloween Head in the superlative vector art program Affinity Designer!

I’ve been trying to round out my roster of classic monsters for a while with a Phantom, but he’s always been a tough nut to crack. Recently I was playing with some shapes and colors and things fell together for me. I thought, “Yeah, that looks a bit like Lon Chaney” so I chased down the rest of the lurker beneath the Opera of Paris, and here we are.

Screenshot of the Affinity Designer window

None of these illustrations are done with any sort of Artificial Intelligence or machine learning. I look at it as sort of like drafting. I cobble together shapes until I am happy with the results. Sometimes I retreat to my sketchbooks in order to figure out a particularly tough shape or view. It always seems easier with a pencil.

Of course pens, pencils and Affinity Designer are not as easy as AI. Yeah it may take me days to complete an illustration, but it’s about the process. I enjoy the work, the happy accidents and the little “aha” moments.

Addendum

I’ve been looking at this here and there throughout the day and decided to wok on this slight variation. The rest of the Halloween Head characters are placed dead center in the frame. That didn’t quite work with this one so I shoved the phantom over a bit. Take a look.