Writing A Dark Poem

I'm currently in the process of editing my latest book, Tourniquet, and I anticipate it will take another month or so to complete. Initially, it was meant to be a short horror story, but I got carried away, and it has now expanded to over 20,000 words.

While I'm working on this project, I have been generating many ideas, one of which is a poem that was intended to be a short story. I experimented with the idea as a poem first to see where it would lead, and to my surprise, it snowballed from there. Writing the entire story in poetry form became a fun challenge, especially making sure everything rhymes. I'll admit that I'm not much of a poet; I tend to prefer rhyming poetry. The story is a haunted house concept, but I won't say much more about it for now. It still requires a lot of editing.

One of the exciting things about this project is that I want to create the artwork for it myself. Initially, I considered using AI for inspiration, but I decided to only use it as a reference. The Dal-e 2 pictures were not producing the desired results, and the 50 credits were not enough for my needs.

These are the Ai designs I made:

Thus far, I have completed around four images in Photoshop, but have now decided against now, as I want the book to refect my physical skills as an artist, rather than digital.

Here are the Photoshopped versions I made:

Here are the Ink drawings I've made and will hopfully be in the book when I publish it. I think they are progressing very well:

I'm drawing inspiration from an artist named Becksiński, who I learned about while watching a YouTuber named Blind Dweller. I highly recommend checking out his work. What I love about Becksiński's dark art is the muted browns and dreamlike themes he creates. Even though they may seem disturbing at first glance, they are stunningly detailed.

Here's some examples of his weird and wonderfully dark artwork:

While working on this poem of mine, I have Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" in the back of my mind. because I love it's darkness and it flow when telling a story. I'm not in the least bit an expert of his work, but I was first introduced to it by James Earl Jones's reading on a "Simpson's Treehouse of Horror" episode. I'm not proud of it, but at least I'm honest haha. I think this opened up a lot of people to Poe who would have never actually known about him. I would love to hear a version of James Earl Jones reading it without all the background nonsense. If I find it before publishing this blog, I'll include the link.

James Earl Jones reading "The Raven".

My day has been very productive so far. I finished my house chores, had breakfast, and watched "The House of the Devil" by Ti West. Now, I'm ready to continue writing and creating artwork for my poem.