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The Sketch of the Day

A little over a year ago Ken and I came to the conclusion that most social media users show a higher rate of interaction to images and posts with minimal text than they do with copy-heavy links to articles.

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It was a bit aggravating at times to see Facebook pages that only posted images, with absolutely no actual written content, rack up the likes and hits while we pushed a page that, at that time, solely existed to drive traffic to our website. We figured we needed something with a little more front-end payoff in the instant gratification department to keep our audience checking in on a daily basis. It would have to be visual, and it would have to be something we could maintain perpetually. This is how our own take on the “sketch of the day” was born.

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It certainly wasn’t anything new. Most of our artist friends were implementing the sketch-a-day concept for various periods of time, like a week or a month. But we wanted to add our own twist to it and keep it within the horror/metal genre – at least for the most part. We also wanted to post a sketch every day. For the first little while that seemed easy enough to do. Ken and I have been drawing regularly since the 80’s, and although we haven’t saved (nor do we want to use) every little sketch we’ve ever done, we did have quite a few kicking around.

When Ken and I first met in the early 90’s, Ken was working on a mini horror-zine called Suicide. It was completely devoted to a contemporary take on the horror genre and featured entirely original content: short stories, comic strips, poetry and illustrations by various writers and artists – mostly graduates of the art college we attended, OCAD. In many ways this little zine was the forerunner to Horror Metal Sounds. Occasionally we’ll even post a sketch that graced those pages, now over 20 years ago!

Click here to download our Best #Sketch_Dailies pdf!

baal4web

"Ken and I have been drawing regularly since the 80’s..."

We live in a cyclical society when it comes to trends in art, culture and music. Things that may not seem relevant at one time will certainly come back into fashion again, even if just in an ironic sense. I’ve become somewhat of an archivist of sorts, and I find myself frequently mining the past (my own past) for not just ideas but actual material that can be resurrected in this digital age of virtual products.

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That being said, we do use mostly current sketches for this feature and we’ve even had a couple of guest sketches from artists Adam Michael Zivkovich and Dan Daoust. We attached a PDF book showcasing some of our favorite sketch dailies and invite you to have a look back with us at some of our quick scribbles over the past year!

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Richard Leggatt, Art Director HMS

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