Artist/photographer David A. Reeves is one of my very favorite artists because he uses paper cut art to create haunting photographic scenes. I am a paper cut artist so pretty much anyone who does something cool with paper cut art is cool by me. Bonus that he does paper cut art with zombies and the video game Limbo. So he’s pretty much the love of my art life. Check him out here.
Samples of some of my favorite shots:
Need some zombie inspiration? Check out the Zombie Autopsies by Steven Schlozman.
Are you participating in NaNoWriMo? Sign up on the linky so that I (and others) can come cheer you on throughout the month!
Happy Thursday zombie friends!
So, for a while I’ve been kind of, oh, what’s the word I’m looking for…ho-hum? How about boring? Can I meet your boring and raise you an idle and uninspired?
Well I’m getting my groove back and starting Monday I’ll be back to bringing you more College of Blogging posts, more writing posts, more inspiration and maybe just a little bit of awesome. What do you think? You guys all good with that? Next week I’m actually bringing back Hot Dystopian Summer Nights ! I’ll talk dystopian all next week and if you want to read what I covered last year, here’s a list of posts: Hot Dystopian Summer Nights 2010!
But first I must share with you one of the MOST WONDERFUL engagement announcement pictures ever by a lovely, inspiring couple from California. These pictures are spreading like wildfire across the internet, and the reason I am reposting them here is because the photographer has been so cute about them being posted everywhere. Photographer Amanda Rynda said in an interview here, “I can’t say I’m surprised. I think viral activity is part of the zombie nature, right?”
Tell me these are the best engagement photos ever?
Zombies!
I haven’t posted many good zombie things lately. Sorry about that.
But! I’m ready to rectify that with an exciting new video game coming to XBox 360 (and PS3 and the computer I think) called DeadIsland. It is a first person shooter RPG with drop in/out co-op play like Left 4 Dead. If you’re not a gamer, that’s cool. This information is probably boring to you then. But! The trailer for the game is one of the coolest trailers for a game I’ve ever seen, forget that it is about zombies. The trailer is gorgeous and sad. Evisceration never looked so heartbreaking. I think playing the game will be more terrifying, but the trailer is quite beautiful. If you like your horror to be kind of lovely and sad and scary all at the same time.
So here is the first trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZqrG1bdGtg
And here is the second recut trailer going backwards (which will make sense only after you watch the original.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BoIqVn-qB4
Here is the official website but alas, it isn’t up and running quite yet. Apparently the game is due out sometime this year, so I suspect the site will be up and running soon too.
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Deadline by Mira Grant, the second book in the Newsflash trilogy (the first, FEED I reviewed here) comes out in May and I bloody can’t wait. FEED was so, so good and the writing was so gutsy. I loved every minute of it. Here’s the cover, and here’s a blurb. Isn’t Mira great?
via GoodReads. Shaun Mason is a man without a mission. Not even running the news organization he built with his sister has the same urgency as it used to. Playing with dead things just doesn’t seem as fun when you’ve lost as much as he has.
But when a CDC researcher fakes her own death and appears on his doorstep with a ravenous pack of zombies in tow, Shaun has a newfound interest in life. Because she brings news-he may have put down the monster who attacked them, but the conspiracy is far from dead.
Now, Shaun hits the road to find what truth can be found at the end of a shotgun.
For my 30th birthday my very best friend in the whole world, costume designer Lydia Dawson, made me zombie-love art. For most this would be totally inappropriate and scream-worthy, but for me it was like she reached into my soul and plucked out my greatest wish. Lydia is currently finishing up her thesis, a steampunk look for Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. I’ll be flying up on March 4th to see it and I absolutely can’t wait. Good luck, girlfriend!
I also think it is quite Valentine’s Day appropriate. Don’t you?
“My Heart For Yours”
I apologize for the grainy photos. My scanner decided to be zombie shy and wouldn’t talk with Photoshop so I had to take these with my camera phone. Trust me when I tell you these pictures don’t do it justice. It is WAY more gruesome in person. It lives on my bookshelf in my office next to the book FEED by Mira Grant, appropriately a zombie novel. I didn’t do this on purpose, it’s just where the alphabet fell last time I added new books.
GRUESOME and AWESOME.
Ok, creepy time. When I took the frame apart to take a picture of the art without getting a reflection of me in my pajamas in the photograph, I realized that the piece had become imprinted in the glass. Like a creepy ghost story. You could only see it when I held it up to a dark background but there it is. CREEPY ZOMBIE LOVERS FOR EVERYONE.
I have to admit, I only barely resisted the urge to make gruesome zombie valentine cards for my card giveaway. I wanted to so bad, but since I don’t know all of the people who wanted one, and even those I did know, I wasn’t sure how well that would go down. “That Tell Great Stories chick is crazy! She sent me a watercolor Valentine card of real hearts and zombies and tried to make it romantic. Idon’tthinkso. LOCK UP YOUR KIDS.“
Instead I’ve got robots and trees and secret messages and stuff. Still cool. Less bloody. I was going to mail them all out today, but I’m not quite done with all of them. I think they’ll all be out by Friday which should still get them to everyone by Monday.
I am so thrilled to announce the two winners of my Trick-or-Treat book giveaway contest! I had a lot of great entries and I am even more excited about the people who have found my blog and stuck around. I really love you guys!!!! Thank you so much!
I won’t hold you in suspense any longer though. The two winners are…
and
I’ll be getting both boxes in the mail sometime this week. I will also be dropping you both emails tomorrow with details about when I’m shipping them out. I hope you enjoy the boxes!
Happy Halloween to the rest of you! It has been a fun month and aside from my one glitch, I really enjoyed posting all the time. I have one post I did not manage to make before the end of the holiday so I will be doing that later next month.
Speaking of next month, at midnight tonight the world kicks off NaNoWriMo – that is National Novel Writing Month and it is a pretty big month for the writing blogosphere. I still intend to post regularly, but I may drop to 3 times a week (mon-wed-fri) instead of 5 days a week. We’ll see. I hadn’t planned to join NaNo this year, but at the last minute I decided what I could really use is a jump start to the creativity center of my brain which has shriveled up a little from editing. I’m going to write a separate story in the same universe as the novel I’m writing and I’m hoping that’ll get me revved up come December to jump back into the main novel.
Who else is doing NaNo this year? Please let me know! My name over there is: tellgreatstories and you’re absolutely welcome to buddy me. I’ll be doing a lot more cheerleading for everyone else than writing, I think, and that’s ok with me. I want to help everyone succeed!
Being that it is the last day of October and Halloween is finally upon us, I have only a couple more things to point you to for the horror lover in us all. First, a t-shirt to tickle the nerd in all of us:
YES. ZOMBIE SCHRODINGER’S CAT FOR THE WIN. You can purchase your very own over at SplitReason for $18.95. I’m wringing my hands over it but I think I’m going to get one.
Unshelved is a comic I love and wholly support, and they posted a preview of the first 3 issues of a new comic called Rotten. Zombies in the Wild West which reminds me of Deadlands the roleplaying game and that’s cool enough for me. I have read the first 2 previews and it looks pretty good. I love me some comics so I’ll be checking them out. It was very nice of the creators to give us a preview. You never see comics being that cool. (Also the post with the preview PDF links have other reviews of zombie books if you’re interested.)
On Sunday October 31st, Halloween, 10/9c, the television show The Walking Dead premiers on AMC.
A television show about zombies, based on one of the coolest comic book series ever of the same name, and I gotta tell you, I’m dead excited.
About the show from AMC’s website:
Waking up in an empty hospital after weeks in a coma, County Sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) finds himself utterly alone. The world as he knows it is gone, ravaged by a zombie epidemic. The Walking Dead tells the story of the weeks and months that follow after the apocalypse. Based on Robert Kirkman’s hugely successful and popular comic book series, AMC’s new original series, The Walking Dead, premieres with a 90-minute episode on Halloween night: Oct. 31 at 10/9c. Written and executive produced by three-time Academy® Award-nominee Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile), who also directs the pilot, and executive produced by Gale Anne Hurd (The Terminator, Aliens), the series debuts during AMC Fearfest, the network’s annual blockbuster marathon of thriller and horror films.
The Walking Dead is an epic, edge-of-your-seat drama where personal struggles are magnified against a backdrop of moment-to-moment survival. A survivalist story at its core, the series explores how the living are changed by the overwhelming realization that those who survive can be far more dangerous that the mindless walkers roaming the earth. They themselves have become the walking dead.
Here’s a special look at the first four minutes of the first episode, and if this is any indication of the rest of the show, we are in for an awesome, scary, well acted television show about zombies. I never thought I’d get to say that. I’m kind of in zombie ecstasy!
As an added bonus, the show has posted a makeup tutorial for zombification. It is a very good tutorial though not for the novice. I like the conditioner tip.
Just in time for Halloween I managed to wrangle costume designer Lydia Dawson into giving me a quick tutorial for the zombie makeup she did for her zombie themed birthday party I threw for her two summers ago. It’s actually the second of three zombie themed parties I’ve thrown for her. Can you tell we like zombies here?
Her makeup was amazing, which isn’t surprising considering she spends all day, everyday designing and actioning costumes. She is currently working as a graduate student at the University of Indiana.
So with no further ado, let me introduce you to Ms. Lydia Dawson, Costume Ninja and Part-time Zombie.
(Edit to add: I don’t know why Lydia looks green in this picture. She wasn’t green. Some of the mossy, mildewy bits were green, but her skin wasn’t. Weird. But check out the gross skin peeling bits! Awesome!)
Making yourself a zombie is by far the easiest makeup job you can do and on short notice, too. If you have professional makeup, like Ben Nye, then you probably already know what you’re doing. If you’re just a normal person and don’t keep theatrical makeup around, I’ll tell you how to do it with whats sitting in your bathroom cabinet.
Zombies are dead and when you’re dead, you start to shrink. Your face starts to sink into your skull and your skin begins to rot. Keep the shape of your skull in mind as you begin. Forcing your eyesockets back and digging out the hollows of your cheeks is the quickest way to make yourself look dead. (And gross. The pictures don’t do it justice, but I’m telling you, it was hard to eat cake with her that night. – Sommer)
The quickest way to make yourself dead is to deaden your eyes. You can do this several different ways. Sweep black or brown eyeshadow (nothing with sparkles!) over your eyelid and up to your eyebrows and then sweep it under your eye, reflecting what you did on top. You are trying to sink your eyes back into your head and by darkening around your eye, it gives the illusion of shadow. Make sure you blend (always blend!) so that you don’t have weird raccoon eyes. Now take a red lip liner and outline your eye to give yourself a bloodshot look.
Once you’re done with your eyes, sweep some baby powder or talc powder over your face to pale your skin out. Don’t go too overboard as you don’t want to look like a clown zombie, unless that is your goal and then I’d be seriously scared of you. You also want to sink in your cheekbones as you’re really pushing for a skeletal outline. Take that same eyeshadow that you used on your eyes and brush it on the hallows of your cheeks. Be careful to blend downwards and not upwards or you’ll darken your cheekbones and then you’ll have ruined the effect.
You can also paint some latex on your cheeks and temples and forehead before you start. Once it is dry, gently pick at it so that it looks scabby. It’s a pretty gross effect and fairly simple to do. Also, if you have some Rice Crispies or Kellogs Corn Flakes, crush them up and mix them in with the latex. You’ll get some really interesting textures and it’ll look like you’ve come down with the plague.
Don’t forget the blood but don’t go overboard! Remember, you have to live in this for a night. 
-Lydia
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I dressed up like a survivor (Zoey from Left4Dead) and Lydia did my dirty makeup as well
though you cannot see it very well in this picture.
Proof that her makeup was scary: she’s holding my cat McKenzie who loves her but was so upset he tried to attack her.
There were others at the party, including several zombies and Bill and Louis from Left4Dead. I wish I had gotten permission in time for this post to show you another girl’s zombie costume because it was pretty awesome. When someone shows up at your house wearing only one shoe and red bloodshot contact lenses, you know they mean zombie business.
Any zombies this Halloween? Send me your pictures and I’ll post them here during my Halloween wrap-up!