Featured Artist: Colby Blair

This week, I’m focusing our attention to a talented creator of zombie sculptures. Keen readers will recognize the below video showing the creation of The Gray Suit Zombie. I posted the video of Colby Blair’s talents in an earlier post. This time, Colby has been gracious enough to answer a few of our questions for zombie art month!

The Gray Suit Zombie

Colby is one of the more well-rounded artists I was able to speak with. His sculptures are made using Super Sculpey and Magic Sculpt epoxy putty. He creates zombie magnets that are molded in silicone and cast in resin. Colby does drawings in colored pencils and ballpoint pens and has been getting into digital art using Photo Shop and a Wacom Intuos 3 drawing tablet. Remember those zombie book marks posted earlier?

So what was Colby’s first introduction to zombies? “This is kind of embarrassing, but I guess my first real introduction to zombies was seeing Michael Jackson’s Thriller video.” Being scared of zombies at a younger age, Colby stayed away from horror films in general. “However, for some reason, I was always drawn to zombies. I would buy any issue of Fangoria magazine with zombies on the cover. I would draw zombies and think about zombies. There was always a fear mixed with fascination”.

As time moved on, Tom Savini’s book, Grande Illusions, entered the picture. “I became fascinated with the images from Dawn of the Dead. I also became aware that all these great zombie films were made very close to my own home. This got me even more interested in the genre.”

As if he hasn’t done enough with the genre already, Colby has also designed his own zombie game, “Brains”. “…the brains game is something I came up with that harkens back to those great games from the late 70s and 80s like Mr. Mouth, Stuff Yer Face, Hungry Hippos, etc.” A game where you catapult brains into the mouth of a zombie? I want one! I would definitely play that with my kids. “It has never really gone past the prototype stage, but I may send the idea to a few gaming companies eventually. It’s very fun to play!”

Colby! You were just bitten by a zombie! As your friend, should I walk away or end your misery? “This is a difficult question. The simple answer should be ‘blow my brains out and put me out of my misery’ but some sick part of me wonders what it would be like to be walking around ‘like that’”.