Joé McKen is an amateur composer, fiction writer and visual artist living in suburban Québec, Canada. He finds it quite peculiar to talk about himself in the third person.
Years since I drew it, I’m still decently pleased with this illustration from a scene in Inhuman:
Hard to say much about this without spoiling certain events, but long story short, Sean (the protagonist) is paying a less-than-pleasant visit to some captured enemies in the hopes of extracting some information. And extract he will.
Here’s a quick reference pose of one of the characters in my Inhuman novel:
And here’s the full character sheet, which I’ve put below the fold for excessively mild artistic nudity.
I got my first graphics tablet in 2010 and I just had to give it a spin. Below is the result: A digital sketch of Aki, a central character from my Inhuman novel.
There was also a colored version, but it never looked half as good as the original.
Dark Horizons
Written by Joé McKen
(Back when he was, like, really young)
Part One
The Dead City
It was a calm and tepid May night. The moon was shining bright in the starry sky, casting its eerie pearly glow upon the parched clouds and giving the waters and buildings below a surreal, almost phantomlike aura. A low, plaintive breeze made the few trees sway slightly, their leaves tentatively bristling before settling back down to a deathly still.
The massive towers of dark glass, steel and stone that populated the island stuck up like a forest of needles towards the sky. Their windows were blackened, mostly broken, and looked as though light hadn’t shone through them in decades. The buildings’ facades were prominently cracked and crumbling, the rubble from which formed mounds of debris in the city streets hundreds of feet below. Once bustling with life and action, these asphalt pathways were now silent and still, covered in a chaotic mess of rusted-through cars, fallen streetlamps, and other random garbage and debris that would’ve made walking amongst them a true navigational nightmare.
Let’s go back in time …
Drawing/sketching is the very first skill I ever developed, possibly before walking, and eons (comparatively) before writing or composing. I was an absolutely obsessive drawer throughout my youth; I likely churned out enough pieces to fill up a small warehouse, and I’m not remotely exaggerating. (Had to do something to pass all those boring school hours.) And that’s taking into account how I rarely completed a drawing before abandoning it – I probably threw out over 95% of everything I ever drew.
Luckily, my mother hung onto some of her favorites through the years and I figured I’d digitize some of them and put them up here for posterity. The below were all taken with my cellphone camera (I don’t have a scanner) and cleaned up a bit in Photoshop to make them presentable. They represent my rough skill level circa 2003—2007 (or when I was 11–15 years old).
Be sure to click the link beneath each image to get the full size.
Let’s start off with my favorite:
