Every year for around Halloween I draw a coloring page of a classic Halloween monster for my kids. Over the last couple years I’ve hosted a Halloween Coloring contest where participants can download my pages, color them how ever they want and enter them. It has been great fun for kids and adults alike. This year I opened the decision of what page to draw to fans of Rybread Studio’s Facebook page. It was between a scarecrow, a pirate, the bride of Frankenstein, or trick or treaters. The people chose The Bride of Frankenstein. I guess I didn’t have a good female representation in my coloring page options.
In this post I will take you through the steps in the creation of this page. I’ve even included a couple videos that captured the actual process of cleaning up the sketch after the jump.
As always I started out with a small sketch or thumbnail. This measures about 6 inches tall. I wanted to play around with composition, body position, and some sort of gag. I thought it would be great to capture the excitement of the bride on her wedding day. After all she is about to married quite a hunk of a reanimated flesh, not much on the brains end, but he would always be there to protect her from mobs of villagers. Plus he secured her a giant diamond ring.
This was also the stage where I could create details like the spider web garniture, bolts like her future hubby’s, bat necklace, and stitches. One thing I could work out was a bridal vail. Everything I tried took away from her trademark bouffant. I was fairly happy with this. On to the actual sketch.
This is where I take the thumbnail and draw it bigger to add more detail. I noticed that in the 1950′s movie the Bride had her arms wrapped like a mummy. I thought I would pay a little homage and include that on one arm. Also with the tall bouffant and fancy dress she started to look like a socialite from the 1700s. So I added a bustle and a fake mole. At this point I ditched the bolts. I always felt like The Bride was the dominant personality in the relationship and had here head screwed on right. She doesn’t need bolts like her main squeeze has.
On all my coloring pages I try to come up with a clever saying. Since there is a large emphasis on the ring I decided to use the old pun “Diamonds are a Ghoul’s Best Friend”. Take it or leave it, I thought it fit with the picture.
Below are two videos I captured during the “inking” process. I used Adobe Illustrator’s pen tool for most of it. The inking process took me about 2.5 hours. To save you time I sped this up about ten times. Enjoy.
There you have it. Now you know my process in what goes into creating a coloring page. Here is the final product.
