Ghost Stories of an Antiquary Revisited

Christmas is a time for ghost stories, so I've chosen from M.R. James' fantastically chilling works and illustrated nine of my favourites. Vector graphics, AI and #p5js combine to produce a revisiting of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.

Each illustration is available on Teia as a single edition, priced at 20 tez. There is also a nine-panel combined image in an edition of 64 at a lower price point.

My favourite illustration, should you care to know, has to be Canon Alberic's Scrapbook, although for the content of the story I am drawn strangely to the terrors of Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You, My Lad, which has the notable achievement of being a truly chilling story that contains an actual ghost in a sheet.

English author Montague Rhodes James is widely-regarded as an excellent writer of ghost stories, many of which were written as Christmas Eve entertainments for the author's guests. Over the years, these stories, possessed of an antiquarian, scholarly feel, have been revisited and reworked for film, stage, audio and television.

Using p5js and a custom rendering engine, I have taken inspiration from some of M.R. James' classic tales, forming dark, pointillist and minimalist structures from low-resolution starting points. Some of these are taken from AI models, others are merely collections of flat vector shapes, to which detail is added using the Perlin-noise-based rendering process.