Unearthing atmosphere through ink

Phantasmal Gothic: Unearthing Atmosphere Through Ink

There’s something hauntingly beautiful about architecture that holds the weight of time—crumbling stone, intricate tracery, towering spires that stretch toward a forgotten sky. My recent piece in the Phantasmal Gothic series is an exploration of that atmosphere, a place where history lingers, and the boundary between reality and the spectral world blurs.

Constructing the Phantasm

This work draws from gothic architecture, not just in form but in essence. I wanted to capture the feeling of a place that exists between worlds where light struggles against shadow, where the past isnt buried but whispers through every crack in the stone. Using pen, I let the intricate details emerge organically, balancing precision with a looseness that allows the piece to breathe.

Symbolism plays a key role in this series. Certain elements decayed archways, distant figures, or an unnatural moon become more than just details. They suggest presence, absence, and the weight of forgotten stories. Inspired in part by Whitby vampire lore, I sought to bring that mythic eeriness into the composition, though not as direct narrative, but as an underlying pulse of the piece.

Ink and Atmosphere

Working in ink, I focused on texture to create depth and contrast. The starkness of black and white lends itself naturally to gothic themes, but I also experimented with different line weights and density to evoke mist, decay, and the shifting quality of light. The process was as much about feeling as it was about rendering allowing the piece to develop as if it were revealing itself to me rather than being strictly planned.

The Next Chapter

This piece is just one step in the Phantasmal Gothic series. As I continue, I want to push the balance between architecture and atmosphere further, perhaps even bringing in other mediums to explore different depths of texture. Each piece is an invitation to step into a space that is both dream and memory, reality and apparition.

For now, this work stands as a doorway, waiting for the next shadow to step through.