Zombieocalypse faux cover
February 2010
Pencil, sketch pens, Sharpie, tablet PC, Adobe Photoshop CS3

This piece was done as a Valentine's gift for my girlfriend, who's a big horror/zombie movie fan. I had the idea of parodying the iconic Army of Darkness framing for the image, and the rest of the idea just kind of blossomed out of that. The first thing I knew I had to do was to design "Zombie Apocalypse Wil" and "Zombie Apocalypse Kim". I wanted both of us armed to the teeth, and gave myself a baseball bat, katana, and Desert Eagle. For Kim, I recruited one of her friends to weasle information out of her, and learned that her ideal weaponry would be a chainsaw (which I decided should be a Binford as an homage to Home Improvement, my favorite sitcom) and the Master Sword from the Legend of Zelda. I also gave her a small handgun, just for the sake of providing her with a projectile weapon.
After designing the two of us, designing the zombies was fairly simple. For two of the zombies (upper left hand corner and lower right hand), I used two of Kim's friends in their Halloween costumes from last year. The other two, I had a vague idea of in my head, and just hammered out their designs as I went along. I was heavily influenced by Zombieland for the postules and discoloration of the zombies. I also made the conscious decision to give all the zombies yellow ees to tie in with my orange, yellow, and brown color scheme.
There's plenty other little inside jokes peppered throughout this piece to make it more personal to Kim, such as her Transformers t-shirt, the studded belt, and the very name of the "company" producing the book. I know I did my job well, because when I gave this to her, she pretty much lost her mind for about twenty minutes, haha!
This piece was drawn on 11x17 bristol board in red lead, inked with Prismacolor sketch pens and Sharpie markers, and colored in Adobe Photoshop CS3. Fonts used are UltraViolent from BlamBot.com, Survival Horror from DaFont.com

The Legend of Zelda © Nintendo
Transformers © Hasbro
Binford Tools © Disney
Artwork and characters © WTAW Productions