You are sitting in your room, alone. It’s dark outside, and there is no sound besides the whispers of the wind. You are on your website/app of choice, eyes glazed over as you mindlessly scroll. It doesn’t matter. The point is that you are alone.

And then suddenly … you hear it. A low buzzing noise. You furrow your brow in confusion. “Where is that coming from?” You ask. And it gets louder. It turns into a banging noise as the volume increases. It’s coming from your wall! What is –

The wall crumbles as a hammer burst through it. You scream in terror as the hammer continues to bust down the wall, creating a larger hole. Until finally, it’s big enough for a person to slide through. You look on in absolute horrified confusion as I step out of the wall, sledgehammer in hand. I smile at you.

“So… you want any art tips?”

For this installment of art tips from your friendly neighbourhood crow person, and in the spirit of this very spooky holiday, I will be teaching you guys how to draw scary stuff. What does that mean? Well, I guess that’s pretty subjective. Horror and what people find scary is inherently up to interpretation.

So, my first tip is simple: Do a “mind map,” which is basically a way to structure and brainstorm ideas. This is vital for any character design, regardless of if it is horror or not. And don’t be afraid to try out ideas or test out even the weirdest ideas. Write that shit down immediately and get to it! Sometimes you can come up with the most interesting designs and concepts from just the weirdest ideas you have.

Winged Canvas, a YouTube channel which has amazing art tutorials (btw I highly recommend them), utilises something called the “What-If” method for character design. It basically boils down to asking yourself “what if this” or “what if that,” and even if you think an idea is stupid, DRAW IT REGARDLESS! You may never know if it works unless you try! In the words of Jessie from Winged Canvas: “That could be the best design you’ve ever done.”

So, with that in mind, the next step is to find out what scares you specifically. What imagery or ideas frighten you? If you don’t know what exactly scares you, again, explore horror media. Play some horror games or watch some horror movies. There is plenty of amazing horror content out there for you to enjoy or shit your pants to. Heck, tap into some old childhood fears and figure out how you could make those fears scary to you as an adult. My favourite horror themed artist of all time is Zdzisław Beksiński. If you haven’t seen his work, look it up. Actually, no, here’s a piece by him that I adore, I’m forcing you fuckers to look at it.

For me, what scares me are uncanny faces or something that doesn’t look quite human. I also find subtlety more scary than outright gore or viscera. I don’t like it when all the information is given to me immediately. H.P. Lovecraft had a cat named the N slur with the hard R, but he also said this: “The oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” So, when thinking about what you fear, you may wanna consider this too. I find liminal spaces freaky, and I have a lingering fear of the dark from when I was a child, which now translates to a fear of what lies in the dark and not knowing what is in the dark.

Now that you have this information, write this stuff down for your mind map!

Once you have this, get even more specific. Start thinking about what scenes scare you. And you can take inspiration from horror media that you’ve engaged with. If it helps, write down a scene in your head of the scariest scenario you can think of. In my case, I find abandoned or empty areas with lots of places for something to hide terrifying. Images like an old hallway with a bunch of clutter in it, it’s probably dark, and partially hidden is something that you can’t quite make out, but it definitely isn’t human, and it is watching you. Whether or not you realise it at first adds to that horror factor as well. That shit is fucking chilling to me.

So, I’m gonna roll with that!!

I started by writing down the scene I had in mind, and in that process, I came up with a few more scenes that could be interesting to draw. One of my favourite pieces of horror media is when someone takes a photo of an existing place, and then draws in a monster or a creature to exist in that space within the photo, editing it to make it make sense. So, I worked from that premise, and I took a few pictures of real-life images and decided on a hallway (props to you if you recognise where this is!).

In my research, I stumbled across a few wonderful inspirations for this drawing. I like to sketch out the monsters I will end up drawing in the final piece to get a sense of what I want to focus on. It helps that I already follow several horror and surrealist artists online, so this process wasn’t as hard for me. And again, if I haven’t stressed this enough, reference these images. Learn what is so scary about them to you and emulate them.

Personal favourites that I think y’all should check out would be @trevorhenderson, @darian_quilloy, @sabrinamiller230, @plastiboo, @leovincible, and @funnyfacefanatic, all of whom are on Instagram. Their works are what I take the most inspiration from, and I think you can see that in the little guy I started drawing.

With the photo taken, and the Little Guy (as I have affectionately dubbed it) sketched out, I am prepared to draw something sufficiently spooky. But before I reveal my final piece, here are a few general rules of horror to keep in mind:

• Less is more. Do not fully show the monster you are drawing. The audience is great at coming up with something way scarier than what you present to them. The human mind is beautiful in its ability to frighten itself. Use that to your advantage.
• Even if you just draw the face of the Monster, avoid showing more detail. A monster is never truly scary when presented in full light.
• Horror is very subjective. So, what might be scary to you might not be scary to other people. But you should always try to appeal to what is scary to you.
• Gore is not scary, it’s just gross and invokes disgust, which can play into fear, but those are still two different emotions.
• Show people your work, test to see if it actually unsettles or scares people. Know that there are multiple kinds of fear responses, and you might want to invoke different kinds of responses.

Without further ado. Meet my friend named Frank! 😀