Posts Tagged lovecraftian sketches

17 results.

Lovecraft Sketch MWF: The Great G’tsubyä

by on March 14, 2012 at 9:25 am
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Happy Wednesday morning! I just got a phone call from the delivery company and I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of a few pallets of The Dream-Quest Graphic Novel sometime today or tomorrow.

In the meantime, I’m starting a new feature on this blog: Monday-Wednesday-Friday Lovecraftian sketches! Some of these are sketches done for Kickstarter supporters, others are original. This particular one — one of the less explicitly Cthulhuvian sketches — was drawn for one of my good friends and shows Gatsby, his pet rabbit. Since I’ve seen said rabbit in person (I made my SAN roll), I hope I have properly captured its non-Euclidian visage. The writhing of its horrible ears! THE TWITCHING OF THAT UNSPEAKABLE PROBOSCIS!

Also, I’ve got a new strip of King of RPGs, my other webcomic, going up today! Stay tuned for more news about the delivery of the books ASAP, and more Lovecraftian sketches (the next one will be more canon) on Friday.

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: Cthulhu

by on March 16, 2012 at 7:11 am
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The nice thing about drawing Cthulhu is you can never draw him the same way twice. Lovecraft’s description is specific enough to give you something to work with (octopus, dragon, bipedal, scaly wings) and yet vague enough to leave lots of imagination space. I recently found this gallery page with 101 great Cthulhu images.

If I had one complaint about drawing Cthulhu, though, it’s that he’s so humanoid (in most interpretations). It’s hard to get away from the basic skeletal structure/body shape of a human being, with the legs this way, the shoulders this way, the hands this way… but since he’s an alien from another planet, and not just a demon or something, technically all his joints and limbs should be arranged in a totally different fashion that just happens to resemble a human being, if at all. But this kind of intricate musculo-skeletal rearrangement (assuming that Cthulhu has a skeleton) is hard to do, and even when artists do come up with really alien body-shapes (like some of the designs in Avatar), often these new shapes distract from the creature’s effect rather than adding to it… leaving me thinking “gosh! that monster moves like a metronome!” or “gosh! that has the body shape of a paper clip!” rather than the more appropriate “OMG~!! THAT MONSTER IS CHASING THE PROTAGONIST!” In short, it’s challenging to draw him so that he doesn’t look like a guy in a Toho rubber monster suit. This drawing doesn’t entirely get away from that, but I liked it.

It’s Friday, so that means another King of RPGs webcomic! And, if there’s a monster or deity you want me to draw, feel free to commission a sketch!

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: The Dunwich Horror

by on March 19, 2012 at 6:19 am
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“The Dunwich Horror” was one of the first Lovecraft stories I read, along with “The Rats in the Walls”, in the 1940s-era anthology Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. It’s still one of my favorite Lovecraft stories, for the sheer craziness and awfulness of the monsters.

Like Cthulhu, the Dunwich Horror is great to draw. “That haff face on top” — that demonic, incongruous human element makes it so much grosser than if it were just an indistinct shoggoth-like blob of protoplasm. (Not that shoggoths aren’t great. Show me a person who doesn’t like shoggoths and I’ll show you a sad, lonely human being.) Another wonderful thing about the story is that it actually interacts with the ‘normal’ world around it — quite graphically — unlike many of Lovecraft’s stories where the creatures, however horrific they may look, are a DISTANT threat, secluded off in another space, another time, another dimension, or stuck in some underground city where they never quite emerge to wreck destruction. Anti-Derlethians may scoff at the good-vs-evil plotline, but it’s so satisfying to read a Lovecraft story where the monster (I say monster, because it literally is one in the teratological sense) wrecks stuff and knocks over fences and kills people!

For this drawing, I was inspired by the shapes of fungus, and by the sticky arms of sundews. The entity here is really a wobbly mass of jelly; the face is superficial, like a birthmark, and even the humanoid eyes on top are, perhaps, not really functional eyes, but just eye-like mouth orifices. It probably has no need for human eyes, the whole thing being really one giant sensory organism, touching everything and feeding on everything, held in a flattish ovoid shape only by Earth’s gravity.

Something I’ve often wondered is, Wilbur Whateley’s twin was born like he was, and maybe it looked more human when it was born, so did it have a name? What about Joe Bob?

Unfortunately, the left edge of this drawing got cut off when I scanned it, and I don’t have the original anymore. But you can see a camera photo of the whole thing, before the pencils were erased, on my commission a sketch page. Also, it’s Monday, so that means a new strip over at King of RPGs!

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: The Dunwich Horror #2

by on March 21, 2012 at 5:44 am
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Here’s my attempt at drawing Wilbur Whateley, the more anthropomorphic of the two title character(s) in HP Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror.” I love, love this story, and I’d like to try drawing him some more. In this version I gave him “goatish” eyes.

One of the interesting things about “The Dunwich Horror” is it shows a new direction in Lovecraft’s monster-descriptions, towards scientific precision. Wilbur Whateley’s inhuman appearance (“Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began…”) is described in clinical detail, almost as if he’s one of the creatures on the dissection table in “At the Mountains of Madness,” another story from the same period. When he was younger, Lovecraft had tended to describe monsters in vague terms or with a few well-chosen metaphors and images (“They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings…”); even Cthulhu is basically an octopus-dragon-man, like Trogdor + an octopus. But now, with “The Dunwich Horror”, rather than describing Wilbut Whateley as “neither a satyr, nor a vampire, nor a leech, nor a dinosaur”, Lovecraft goes obsessive-compulsive with details of in EXACTLY what way he’s an alien entity. It’s like he’s saying “You mock me for using the term ‘indescribable’, eh? Well, TAKE THIS!” I think it works really well, and it’s the beginning of the science-fiction phase that marks the second half of his writing career. Plus, in “The Dunwich Horror”, there’s still a welcome feeling of wrongness and creepiness to it all, unlike the more level-headed “it had x tentacles that were x feet long” descriptions in “The Shadow out of Time” or “At the Mountains of Madness.”

Is there a Lovecraftian creature you’d like me to draw? Feel free to commission one! Also, check out Wednesday’s strip over at King of RPGs!

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: The Flying Polyps

by on April 2, 2012 at 10:43 am
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The Flying Polyps (from H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Out of Time”) are some of Lovecraft’s harder-to-visualize monsters. They never show up onscreen (so to speak) and the description doesn’t give that much to work with; they can fly without wings, they need no eyes, they’re really hard to kill, they can turn invisible, they leave weird footprints… as if they’re creatures in a RPG, we read a lot about how tough they are, but not so much of what they look like or how they behave. How do they interact with other life forms? What do they do with their prey? I didn’t show it in this drawing, but perhaps their digestive system involves the manipulation of wind and air currents… They lack the hostile fury and semi-anthropomorphism of the lizards from “The Nameless City,” another buried race, and perhaps they’re at their creepiest when they’re down there unseen in the darkness. My drawing here is possibly too literally based on a coral polyp (a coincidental resemblance, surely, since they are related to no Earthly life), but maybe I’ll try drawing another version of these many-footed creatures later.

I spent almost the entire weekend at Emerald City Comic Con, and it was one of the best times I’ve ever had at a convention. I got to meet lots of people and sign lots of copies of Dream-Quest, which had its last pre-release appearance at the con (it comes out in comic stores this week). I also got to talk to lots of cool comic folks I don’t see often enough — Chloe Chan, Jake Myler, Nina Matsumoto, Amber Lamb, Cari Corene, Miriam Libicki, Jim Zubkavich and many others. To everyone who came by and said hello, thank you so much!

I’m working on The Doom That Came to Sarnath but the first page will probable go up next week instead of this week, since I have guests coming into town for Sakuracon. If you missed me at Emerald City, here’s another chance to see me at a convention, in Seattle on April 6-8! Plus, I’ll be running some roleplaying games!

Today’s King of RPGs strip just went up, and I’m also taking sketch commissions as usual! If there’s something you’d like to see me draw, let me know!

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: Ithaqua

by on April 4, 2012 at 12:33 pm
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I’ve never thought Ithaqua was a very impressive name for a monstrous entity of the northern wastes since it always makes me think of a town in New York. But, Algernon Blackwood’s short story The Wendigo is one of the greatest horror stories ever , and if August Derleth wanted to add the Wendigo to the Cthulhu Mythos under another name, I’m all for it. IMHO, there’s nothing other authors have written after Blackwood that adds anything to the creepiness of that story. As far as role playing game supplements go, frankly, I know a lot of people liked it, but I was disappointed by John H. Crowe III’s The Walker in the Wastes because it has too much Brian Lumley and not enough Algernon Blackwood. Although I loved Glenn Rahman’s Call of Cthulhu solo adventure, Alone Against the Wendigo…

It’s Wednesday, so I hope you’ve checked out today’s King of RPGs! And of course, I’m always available if you want to commission sketches!

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: The Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath

by on April 9, 2012 at 8:44 am
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Robert Bloch’s story “Notebook Found in a Deserted House” is one of the all-time great Cthulhu Mythos stories. It’s so creepy, and Bloch’s sparse style is so much better suited for a ‘found manuscript’ style tale than Lovecraft’s excessively florid tales in the same style like “The Diary of Alonzo Typer” (although, now that I think of it, nearly all of Lovecraft’s tales are presented as first-person written manuscripts). Also, I grew up in a house in the woods, and I remember being scared when my parents went away, or exploring the creeks and gulleys alone until sometimes, all of a sudden, I’d grow nervous and prick up my ears, as if listening for… something… coming closer, just beyond the next tree. This story captures that feeling perfectly.

In gaming terms, it’s also notable for being the first story to feature what would become the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath (since Sandy Petersen named them that for the Call of Cthulhu RPG). Actually, in the story, it seems clear that the monster with thousands of hooves and slime-dripping mouthes is supposed to be a shoggoth (maybe a woodsy, Northern Deciduous Forest shoggoth), but it does mutter prayers to Shub-Niggurath, so it works for me. Somewhere during the development of the RPG, though, the body shape of the shoggoth/Dark Young became somewhat formalized and it was decided that they only have three big hoofed feet and a generally tree-like shape… but in the story they don’t say how many hooves it has, so I’ve always pictured it as more like a big horrible rolling blob of no distinct form. And yet, there’s a definite vegetal nature to it all, somehow… the tentacles sprouting out of one another like branches… the mouthes opening like boles in tree trunks…

I had a great time at Sakuracon last weekend and ran a bunch of roleplaying games and met lots of folks, including some readers who’d collected Dream-Quest since it first came out in the ’90s! Over at King of RPGs, a new storyline just started, so go read it! And if you like, check out my commissioned sketches!

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: The Tree

by on April 11, 2012 at 5:14 am
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H.P. Lovecraft’s The Tree is not one of my favorites among his stories. It’s so short it goes by in a breeze, so it seems unfair to pick on it, though. The main problem with it, to me, is that — like many readers it seems — I simply couldn’t figure out the incredibly dry irony of the whole piece, in which it seems that the sculptor is (SPOILER) but actually really he’s (SPOILER). For years I didn’t have a clue what the story was about. And yet when I finally did figure it out, thanks to S.T. Joshi I think, the story simply changed from head-scratching and inscrutable to simple & obvious. Maybe the final word of the story should not have been not “Oiao” but “PSYCH!!!”

I do like Ancient Greece, though, so that’s in its favor. The whole Greco-Roman era is fascinating to me — it’s a shame Lovecraft never expanded his very promising and creepy Ancient Roman horror dream, “The Very Old Folk,” into a full story. (Though Frank Belknap Long did his own Derlethian ‘posthumous collaboration’ with it and used the dream as a small part of his novel The Horror from the Hills.) I also appreciate the minor detail that Lovecraft is a materialist to the last and, even in this very straightforward revenge-from-beyond-the-grave story, the tree which grows from the sculptor’s grave grows from the *head* of the sarcophagus. Only from the brain, the seat of intelligence, can such seeds grow…

Over at the King of RPGs site, I’ve just started a new long storyline, so it’s a good time to jump onboard! And if you’d like me to illustrate an even more obscure story than “The Tree,” commission a sketch and I’ll do it! I may draw the line at “The Street,” though.

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: The Old Ones

by on April 13, 2012 at 5:01 am
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One of the first illustrations of a Lovecraftian creature I ever saw, sometime in the ’80s, was the drawing of an Old One in Wayne Barlowe’s Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials. The Old Ones stuck out by their total nonanthropomorphism, their radial/vegetable body shape, and their branching “I dare you to draw all 125 of them” limbs. Later, in Meade & Penny Frierson’s fanzine “HPL”, I saw tons more drawings of Old Ones, drawn with somewhat less naturalism and skill but a lot more vigor and character — these vegetable-starfish beings were jus’ folks, darnit! If Guillermo Del Toro ever manages to make “At the Mountains of Madness,” one of the real treats will surely be seeing the puppeteers/CG artists give human and emotional qualities to these extremely alien-looking creatures. And of course, they *do* have emotions — that’s the whole point of the story.

Visually, they’re so alien they’re not even scary; they’re like vastly enlarged radiates, like a highly-evolved, sentient version of a biological domain that only exists in primitive microscopic form here on the Earth. Since they created all life on Earth, I think any resemblances to Earthly life must be because we (de)volved from them. Even in my own limited knowledge of science, though, I do have to tsk-tsk Lovecraft for having the Old Ones remain unchanged in physical shape over the millions and millions of years in which they inhabited the planet. Did they have no form of evolution, natural or artificial? If they never changed, wouldn’t that mean they would gradually get out-competed by awesomer life forms? But it’s much cooler conceptually to imagine that there are creatures out there that are SO great, even billions of years of evolution couldn’t improve them. Of course, as a human with my limited perspective, I can barely even imagine how a recognizable culture could survive for 10,000 years, let alone a sentient species survive for 100,000. Deep time…

I think the inking turned out well in this one. I’ve been thinking of doing what they call “master studies” (i.e., to put it more bluntly, straight-up copying another artist) and trying to do duplicates of old Victorian newspaper prints, to see how difficult it is to get that lovely, fine-lined ink shading. The kind of art that used to be everywhere, the kind that Max Ernst used to form his cut-up novel Une semaine de bonté (A Week of Kindness). Not that this has anything to do with the Mountains of Madness, the Elder Things or the Old Ones. But although it’s totally not suited for digital art, there’s something very satisfying about carving out images from hundreds of little lines.

If you liked this sketch, please check out my new King of RPGs webcomic storyline! It’s a good place to jump onto the story. Also, I do commissioned sketches!

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Lovecraft Sketch MWF: The Great Race of Yith

by on April 16, 2012 at 4:47 am
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Not that I’m any great shakes at designing aliens, but one small thing that bothers me, design-wise, about Lovecraft’s ‘civilized’ alien races (the Old Ones and the Great Race), is that they seem to lack any way to lift heavy objects. Sure, they have technology (and in the case of the Old Ones, slaves) but what did they do to take care of the place & carry groceries before they developed that technology? The Old Ones have little teeny-weeny weakish-looking tentacles (maybe they can exert a lot of pressure when you put them together, but still) and the Great Race have limbs growing out of the tops of cones — not the best way to get leverage. My solution to this was to decide that, perhaps, their ‘cone’ is really divided on the inside into four approximately equal segments, and the muscle or cellular tissue of the limb runs all the way down to the core of the cone at the bottom, instead of just sticking out of the top. Instead, like a snail’s eyestalk or a turtle’s head, we’re just seeing a small portion of it which is extended. The brain or core of the Great Race, then, would be located towards the bottom of the central cone, where all the powerful muscles of expansion and contraction are located.

For comparison, here’s my drawing of the Great Race’s enemies, the flying polyps. The flying polyps are free from the constraints of gravity, but (in my vision) they’re basically worm-shaped, or shaped like branching worms — a great twisting writhing floating branch. When I reread “The Shadow Out of Time”, I noticed the part where it’s said that the Great Race breed their young in tanks or vats, kind of like playpens, I assume. But I’m sure that now and then, one of them gets out of the tank and runs around and cause mischief.

It’s Monday, and over at King of RPGs, a new storyline with Theo and Shesh is brewing! And if you’re interested, I do commissioned sketches!

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