Above is the cover of the latest book, Midnight Friends: Scratchboard Art. It's all black and white engravings other than a few color pictures at the end in the preview section hinting at books to be released, such as Mezzy.
This visual art section of the site is unrelated to most of the imagery on the site associated with Sound Animal band singles and albums, though some of those music covers are my photographic art or mixed media. I can't claim the rest of the cover art as my own. However, I've been a visual artist since youth and heavily involved in the art scene. For example, I co-ran an art gallery in Montevallo, Alabama called Four Winds, I was art director of the multi-media literary magazine Mad Hatters Review, I was both painting and photography judge for an international contest, and I published other people's art in Exclusive Magazine and LucidPlay Publications. My art has been published in many magazines and anthologies, often on covers and features; I was The Times Journal of Photography's World Class Photographer. I had many shows, including Reality Burn!, which toured the Spanish Levant for years.
I've always been a imaginative person alternating between and combining various forms of creativity including music, poetry, fiction, video, painting, printmaking, photographic art, and so on. This site was designed for the Sound Animal band, and it includes the music related novel, Floating on Secrets, but I quit recording music a few years ago. I teach fiction and poetry writing as well as edit manuscripts, so I periodically focus on that entirely before returning to one of the creative modalities. The current one is visual art books.
The first book, Midnight Friends, is black and white scratchboard art, mostly standalone but also abstract comics and an illustrated story. Many of the surreal pieces are ambiguous and are accompanied by a variety of people's contrasting interpretations of what's going on.
The next book, Mezzy, also includes some interpretations. Many of the standalone pieces in this one began as proof pages for Midnight Friends, some of which ended up in that book and some of which didn't. I transformed the proof pages in various ways, like coloring with markers or oil pastels, collaging with construction paper borders, and cutting out new characters from the pages, and adding in the Mezzy character. Those are interspersed with drawn portraits of Mezzy, an abstract comic in white gel pen, and a graphic story.
Beyond the few below, you can see pictures and find links to stores featuring them printed on clothing and other goods at my art website, Midnight Friends.
My Instagram SoundtheAnimal is also now devoted to the art and my Facebook page, Tantra Bensko Author also keeps fans up to date with the latest books, which are now visual, though the ones that were released in the past were psychological suspense. People who like that art form may enjoy my Pinterest board Scratchboard Art.
