Gentleman Krampus

 

He knows when you've been bad.

I'd been threatening for years to make a Krampus Christmas card and I ended up making two of them. I wrote about the first sketches for them in a blog post from waaaaay back in 2012 and ended up finally completing them in 2015 and 2016. 

For all who don't know, in the Alpine regions of Europe, St. Nick has a sidekick, who sort of works as "bad cop" to his "good cop": this is Herr Krampus. My version of him looks a bit more gentlemanly and Victorian. I was inspired by seeing a video of a Krampusnacht  parade and one dapper costumed Krampus in a top hat kissing a lady's hand.

Krampus Nacht happens on the 5th of December, but I find that the horned rascal is festive enough for the whole holiday season. 

I began the illustrations by photocopying these early sketchbook cartoons from 2012, enlarging them to trace on my lightbox onto bristol paper.

I had wanted to paint and ink them in full color this time, adding a decorative circle motif to each. I ended up using not only my gouache and ink pens, but my colored pencils as well.    

I began by inking the outlines with colored waterproof brush pens, animation style. Then I gradually started layering acrylic gouache on top of them, going with red, green, amber and gray as my color schemes.

In some old art of Krampus, he is shown as having both a cloven foot and a more bestial, claw-like foot. I decided to do that with one of my versions of him.

As well as being somewhat Dickensian, the clothes he is wearing are inspired by early 19th century German men's fashion, with some liberties taken. I really liked the wider-brimmed top hats of the period. 


Here's the first of my Krampuses— Krampi?— to be finished. I scanned it into Photoshop to do some clean-up on the image. While many people do all of their work digitally these days, I still prefer traditional paint and ink on paper. For me, working with physical pencils, pens and brushes is therapeutic. However, I will eventually use Photoshop to help clean up and refine the finished version before I share it.

I had actually painted two versions of the first Krampus (the one with the long tongue) and had decided almost toward the end that I didn't like the colors I was using; and so, I fussily started a new one from scratch. (This is also what happens when you use traditional methods.) I used the first version as a "study" to hopefully improve the second version.

In the past, some of my old paintings had gone through three different versions before I had gotten to one that I liked. Sometimes it's fun to take an old piece of artwork you've done and remake it with the skills you've hopefully learned since your first attempt. 

This wasn't one of those times, however.

What happened was that the second version came out almost identical to the first version. My first version hadn't been as bad as I had originally thought and now, I had two similar paintings. I ended up giving one of them away as a Christmas present.

Sometimes, you just need to put something down and walk away from it before you let yourself get too frustrated with it. Sometimes you might already be on the right track.

Finally, I turned both versions of Gentleman Krampus, the dashing rapscallion, into Christmas cards.

Have a happy Yule, everyone, and remember that he knows when you've been bad or good.

                                           ...Especially when you've been bad.