Dustin Parker's Monster Mania

When I started working on the Monster Mania series, I wasn’t expecting the series to continue beyond the first 10 drawings. I just wanted to draw some cool monsters for a Halloween themed art exhibition. I also never intended for the original Monster Mania logo to be anything more than a cool type treatment on a promotional flyer. It was just a tiny little graphic on a postcard that I quickly cobbled together in Adobe Photoshop.  It took me a few years, but I finally got around to designing a new Monster Mania logo. The new logo takes some inspiration from the original logo. I kept the big googly eye and the drippy / scratchy text for Mania. I wanted the logo to have the same vibe as the original Garbage Pail Kids Logo and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles logo from the original 1987 animated series. I wanted the new Monster Mania logo to invoke that same feeling. I was trying to capture the joyful weirdness of my childhood. I also took some inspiration from Matthew Allison’s logo t...

My original idea for this drawing was a super muscular hot dog with ridiculously huge arms. I was amused by the idea of a skinny stick of processed meat with hulking arms covered with veins and baby oil. And the hotdog would have scrawny little legs because he always skips leg.  I played around with the idea, but I wasn’t happy with the drawing. Sometimes a drawing isn’t working, and I have to choose between fighting the drawing or abandoning the drawing. In my experience fighting the drawing usually leads to more frustration and depression. A bad drawing day doesn’t get better with more bad drawing. It is often best to walk away to fight another day.  In this case, I decided to nuke the hot dog and start over. Instead of big bulging muscles, the hot dog would be emaciated like a zombie, and his buns would be covered in mold. I imagined a rotten hot dog languishing on the floor of a gas station restroom.  You definitely don’t want to eat this hot dog.  

This drawing of a disgruntled candy heart is my tribute to Valentine’s Day. This little heart-shaped sugar candy just wants to be left alone. Big googly eyes are a trademark of my Monster Mania drawings. I like the blank stare. I think it is super creepy. But sometimes I want to convey some emotion and I need to employ some eyelids or eyebrows to make the eyes more expressive. I started with googly eyes and then I tried angry eyes and then I landed on tired eyes. This poor heart is old and tired.  All of my Monster Mania drawings present the monster against a monochromatic background. The backgrounds are created by stacking 3 or more abstract drawings on top of each other. Each abstract drawing is made using hundreds of biomorphic shapes. I often adjust the opacity or apply blending modes to the drawings to allow the lower layers to show through the upper layers. This creates an interesting texture. I like the visual static. It is more interesting than using a flat color. On this p...

I have a strict set of rules that I follow when creating a Monster Mania drawing but those restrictions still leave plenty of room to experiment and evolve. The most notable change has been my approach to coloring the drawings.  The early drawings were colored in a more painterly style, and I used a variety of watercolor and chalk brushes to color the drawings. I would start by laying a foundation of splatters and drips and textures, creating an abstract painting that served as both a background and an underpainting for the drawing. I would then proceed to color the line art using flat colors. Then I would use chalk brushes to paint the shading and highlights. I would often play with opacity levels and layer effects to allow bits and pieces of the abstract underpainting to show. The end result was messy and haphazard like a real painting.  In 2018, Clip Studio Paint became available on the iPad, and I started doing the majority of my inking and coloring on my iPad. The iPad ch...

I currently draw all of the Monster Mania drawings on my iPad Pro using Clip Studio Paint. I have hundreds of brushes but I use Frenden’s “Inker - Nib Stiff” and “Inker - Nib Flexible” brushes to do the majority of my digital inking and coloring. I also love to draw and color using the lasso tool. I do all of my inking and coloring in Clip Studio Paint and I use Adobe Photoshop to add some texture and grit. Roughly 95% of the work is done in Clip Studio Paint and the remaining 5% is done in Adobe Photoshop on my Mac Studio.  I’m a decrepit old man and drawing makes my hand hurt. It doesn’t help that I hold my Apple Pencil in a peculiar way. The Apple Pencil is also really thin. I like my stylus to be thick. My grip of choice is the pro-draw grip. Most grips are not thick enough for my taste and all of them like to slide off of the Apple Pencil during use. The pro-draw grip is super thick, it stays in place, it is extremely comfortable to draw with, it helps alleviate my drawing pai...

Many of my Monster Mania drawings begin as doodles on post-it notes. This drawing of an angry fish is one such drawing. I don’t keep a sketchbook, but I often draw quick sketches on post-it notes or scraps of paper whenever inspiration strikes. This divine inspiration usually happens when I’m trying to go to sleep. The image of a monster will pop into my head, and I have to leap out of bed to capture the creature on paper. I don’t draw sketches to get better at drawing. I draw sketches to remember ideas for drawings. I’ve found that drawing doodles and writing notes help reinforce my memory. 

This is my version of the eggplant emoji. 

All of my monsters have skin problems. They are all covered with warts and pimples and skin tags and necrotizing fasciitis. I often hide little smiley faces amongst the constellations of pimples and cysts. A small reward for the people that take the time to closely examine my drawings. It is my version of Where's Waldo. Many of the drawings don’t have a hidden smiley face. Sometimes I forget to draw one. And many of the drawings predate the tradition.  With this drawing. I wanted the focus to be the Smiley Face. This drawing is a zoom-in view of one of those little Smiley faces growing on the skin of another monster. This little guy is just another skin growth in a sea of warts and pimples. The green goo is a reference to The Watchmen by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins. And Yes. There is a little Smiley Face hidden in the drawing. I hope this drawing put a smile on your face.

When I was a child, I loved to play with insects and draw insects and study insects. My next door neighbor’s house was surrounded by a beautiful flower garden that attracted swarms of bumble bees, grasshoppers, praying mantises and butterflies. It was insect heaven. But that was the 80s, I rarely see a grasshopper or a monarch butterfly these days. I imagine this Monarch Butterfly has mutated in order to survive climate change and deforestation and droughts and pesticides and herbicides and angry birds and hungry spiders. This Monarch Butterfly’s nectar is human blood. It has seen things and it has done things. Terrible. Horrible. Things. But it is still a beautiful butterfly. 

This drawing was inspired by an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Genesis.” In the episode, Dr. Crusher accidentally creates a virus that infects the crew of the Enterprise and causes them to de-evolve into primitive forms of life. Lieutenant Barclay transforms into a spider creature. The Barclay spider design is asymmetrical. He is half spider and half human. It is a very striking visual.  I went with a more symmetrical design. More spider than man. I gave my man spider human-like eyes rather than black soulless spider eyes. I think the human-like eyes are more terrifying and more expressive. And big googly eyes are a trademark of my Monster Mania drawings. 

I love watching splatter films. I love over-the-top blood and gore. I love splatstick. I love gruesome kills. I love buckets of blood. That being said. In real life, the sight of blood makes me queasy. I love blood and gore in my entertainment. And I love to draw gross and disgusting things. But I want all of the blood and gore to stay in the world of make believe.  Anyway… This is a drawing of an anthropomorphic T-bone steak in a pool of blood. I’m super happy with how the pool of blood turned out.  I keep seeing these videos of people eating high meat, rotten meat that is allowed to decompose for several days, weeks or years. I think it might be fun to draw a zombie version of this T-bone steak monster. What would this little hunk of meat look like after a few weeks of decomposition. I think it would be fun to draw some green meat covered with mold, maggots and slime.  Drawing rotten meat is fun but I have zero interest in eating it.