How childhood memories and crime photos inspired this Costa Rican vampire art

Ricardo Delgado: When I’m working on my book projects, I turn off the comic book-making part of my brain and use the concept art side, which allows me to create concept art illustrations for my stories. I don’t really think in terms of comic books until I storyboard on a project, whether it be mine or for a studio.

Even then, a storyboard panel is slightly different than a comic book panel in the sense that a board panel might be only capturing a fraction of a second, whereas a comic panel can have word balloons that describe an entire conversation or action, if that makes sense.

RD: In a creature effects studio or in a film’s art department, usually there are multiple iterations of a character that are generated and presented to the decision makers, be it a director or studio head. So that’s the process that I took here in Vampyre, where there are multiple versions of the different forms that the Nosferatu transforms into.

This was a lot of fun because it could give the reader their preferred version of, say, the bird form of the vampire. There are at least three or four versions of each form, and in each case I started out by utilizing Costa Rica’s bountiful animal fauna: the bird form was inspired at first by a raven, but then I found out that there’s no ravens or crows in Costa Rica, but there’s this really aggressive little black bird called a Teńate that looks like a roadrunner capable of flight. Made the process more fun and interesting to me, and hopefully to the readers.

RD: Most of the vampire action takes place at night, yet I had a very strict geographical structure to my story that used real-life locations, and that will be represented in the book with prose but also with maps that explain the placement of where the murders in the story take place, most of which are important to the history of the small town in Costa Rica called Alajuela. I think it’s cool to open Google Maps and place the map in my book side by side and see that all the places in the story still exist. Super proud of that.

RD: More from an overall dark silhouette, and after which I could add details to lead the eye. Some of the creature designs are very surreal, while some of the murder scene images are based on crime scene photos I saw as a little kid that horrified me.

It was a book that contained police crime scene photos, and I dunno whether they were mob hits or not, but they scared me. Perhaps it was a library book; the memory wanes. I was super little, in elementary school years, so the images of slumped over victims or bodies lying out on a sidewalk with pools of blood coming out from underneath really made an impression upon me, and that’s what I was going for here.

If you think about it, that kind of horror was never seen in those early horror films, thinking specifically of the Universal monster films, yet those crime photos really affected Kid Me.

RD: There are a few ways that structure can be explained in storytelling, and really ya can’t get any better than maps, which work in concert with a written work. Both help each other and help create a more of a real world for the story.

In the story, the murders take place in specific locations around Alajuela, the small town in which my parents grew up, and while there was a definite nostalgic factor in creating the maps, I really felt that the readers would find a greater sense of satisfaction with them.

Think about movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Fellowship of the Rings, and how the use of maps in those films really gave visual context to the story being told. That’s what I was going for and hope I’ve succeeded.

RD: In most book illustrations, there’s the tendency to simply depict scenes from the story, which is usually different than creature concept design for feature films or television.

I was tempted to draw up a few of the chases through the night in pursuit of the vampire, but felt like the process of creature design art is such a unique thing that it would serve the project better to focus on the character itself, in its many undead forms, as well as the victims, which felt more visceral to me because of the crime photo nature of their depictions.

Also felt like some of the photos in the book, both past and present, of the town in the story would serve as another form of visual engagement for the audience. It’s more like my training in film, or at least what I observed, with locations being depicted as photos and characters being designed in art form.

RD: I do work both traditionally and digitally, and am comfortable in both, yet I do have a bit of a tendency to go back to sketch form with pencil/paper to rough out some of the ideas that are not fully formed when I sit down to work. From there, the work in this book was finished digitally, and there was more of an effort in this one to stray toward the surreal in terms of the creature designs as I went along.

If you read stuff like One Hundred Years of Solitude, there is a magical realism that is put out through stories that place you in the real, and then something out of the ordinary happens. That happens a lot in classic ghost stories, where there will be a formed, united context, then a ghost walks out and scares the bejesus out of you.