©2011 Peter Diamond

In the last month and a half, my work has been hampered by the onset of what I’m calling Artist’s Elbow (epicondylitis, of both the lateral and medial sorts as far as I can tell), and as a result several running illustrations have been slow coming to fruition. This one, the 5 of Diamonds for the second edition of  Zeixs Publishing’s ’52 Aces’ card deck, may well be my last drawing of 2011. I hope to be able to give the old drawing arm some rest for the Holidays.

While unintentional, I find the content of the image amusingly fitting considering my current trouble. This project came with near total creative freedom, and I think the hand imagery was more about the number 5 than it was about epicondylitis (I certainly would have had a harder time coming up with elbow ideas) but nevertheless I have to wonder if there isn’t a subconscious relationship. In fact this is the second consecutive Disembodied Hand image I’ve done this month, I plan to post the other shortly. I do seem to have a thing for Addams-esque hand creatures, but I suspect their repeated appearance in my work of late is likely not pure chance.

The geometric background is a departure for me, brought on by the perspective drawing classes I was teaching last month at Illuskills. I think it’s a nice counterpoint to the organic forms and wobbly linework I like to use, and I will likely explore it further.

©2011 Peter Diamond

Tomorrow’s edition of The National Post will feature my illustration for the ‘Month Ahead’ calendar on the cover of the Arts & Life section, many thanks to AD Geneviève Biloski for the gig. The brief was wide-open, the theme being ‘December’.

As it happened, shortly before the commission I had received an email from my father in New Brunswick with photos of his lovely country house under a thick blanket of snow and was itching to draw the scene. The detail that jumped out at me most was the bird house, weighed down with snow and nicely mirroring the cabin behind it. In the end I used an old-fashioned Austrian ‘Almhütte’ rather than the cabin on my dad’s land.

The main figure, more intended as a kind of Old Man Winter character than a Santa Claus, also owes a lot of its look to my Austrian surroundings. The differences between the Austrian Christmas celebrations and those I’ve grown up with have piqued my interest in the earlier ‘pre- Hallmark’ traditions, and while a certain Santa-ness was almost inevitable with this character I have tried to steer away from the big red Coca Cola Santa.

The piece is very tall and thin (over 20 inches in height) so I’ve posted it in a reduced format at right, but below is a larger version. Despite all the very legitimate critiques of Christmas consumerism, I still love Christmas time, and I’m waiting eagerly for the first good snowfall here in Austria, so I was very happy to have the chance to indulge my love of winter with this job.

©2011 Peter Diamond

©2011 Peter Diamond

It’s been a little while since I drew something for Michael Kimber at Colony Of Losers. The first few images I made for him drew from the frenetic energy and nearly desperate inspiration present in his writing on his daily battle with anxiety and insomnia. I took full advantage of the free creative reign he gave me to make pretty far-out interpretive images to accompany his stories.

Since that time Michael has in large part overcome his struggles, and his writing took on an accordingly different tone. More considered and deliberate, and more centered on the wider public issues of mental illness in general. He seemed to have broken through from his past frame of reference.

This image focuses on that change, presenting a visual metaphor for the way ideas and even personalities can change with exposure or a change of environment. In this case I felt that the more exposure Michael’s story was receiving and the more his environment stabilized, the more his writing – which had been quite molten at the outset – became tempered and solidified.

Interestingly, Michael actually wrote the piece which this illustration accompanies partly in response to the image itself. We had talked a little bit about where I was coming from with the piece and it seems to have resonated with his feelings at the time. It’s interesting to note how the style of the piece shows a bit of a return to his earlier voice while still clearly coming from a different place further along in life than where he started.

©2011 Peter Diamond

Recently I had the time to finish up a personal piece that had been sitting on the back burner for a while, mostly done but lacking those final touches. This piece is one of a series of -so far- three images based on myths and stories in the world of hockey, along with The Winnipeg Falcons and The Playoff Beard. This one deals with one of my very favorite of hockey’s weird stories, the Detroit Octopus.

The tradition of throwing an octopus on the ice at Detroit Red Wings playoff games was started in the 1952 Stanley Cup run, by the Cusimano brothers of Detroit. The legend has it that the octopus’ eight limbs represented the eight games the team would need to win in order to capture the Cup (it’s now sixteen games). The Wings won the Cup that year in eight straight games, and two more Cups in the next three years.  Since the first octopus was thrown in 1952, the tradition has been carried on every single season. The NHL has tried to curb and even stop the practice, but it persists as one of hockey’s oldest and weirdest traditions.

The illustration shows the great Detroit goalie Terry Sawchuck in action against the Montreal Canadiens, with a little help from the Octopus. I wanted a composition for this piece reminiscent of the crammed battle scenes of Utagawa Kuniyoshi or the one-panel samurai fight drawings of Stan Sakai, but with hockey sticks in place of swords.

Prints of this image are available at Thumbtack Press

©2011 Peter Diamond

I was very pleased to work with AD SooJin Buzelli for the August issue of Plansponsor magazine. Plansponsor‘s content is very dry financial stuff, incomprehensible to most of us, and SooJin does a great job getting great work out of illustrators by using very simple briefs for the complicated subject matter.

In this case the article had to do with the impact of aging on retirement income, and the brief was simply ‘a beautiful image of someone getting old’. Had I attempted to illustrate retirement income I don’t doubt something very forced and probably painfully corny would have come out of it, this way I was able to really get in to the image.

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©2011 Peter Diamond

Also on the table this past month was a book cover for a relatively new independent publisher Chômu Press. I had never done a book cover before, and I haven’t been asked to draw in a horror vein for quite some time (though I used to do it fairly often for CD covers) so this was a fun project.

The book is The Orphan Palace by Joe Pulver, an occult  psychedelic horror tale in which the main character is possessed by an obsessive pyromania and scarred by childhood memories of electroshock torture. The idea I worked with here was to portray the character’s inner devil that drives him to arson and murder, and work in a few of the things referenced in the text like the noir paperbacks he gathers along his way, Anubis’ jackals, and of course the houses he burns as he goes. AD Anil Nataly also added another touch, placing a small rat in amongst the title lettering on the front cover. A rat becomes an important character in the story.

Below are the mock-ups of the paperback with and without lettering. The book will be released in p-o-d paperback and e-book. I think this very well may be the way of the future for small press, so that was another interesting facet of this job.

My description certainly doesn’t do justice to all that’s going on in the book, so if you want to know more and especially if you’re a fan of horror and weird fiction, I suggest you check out the details in the above links.