Cthulhu is not an octopus... Part 3

Further to my previous drawing (here) and my initial discussion about Cthulhu not being and octopus (here), below is another quick drawing:

Note the lack of tentacles (and suckers) - I've tried to depict what Lovecraft described as 'a mass of feelers'. I may have a few more tries along similar lines, but Cthulhu rarely sits still long enough for his... er, its... portrait...

Artwork for The Lovecraft eZine...

Awhile back I had the chance to create some artwork for the latest issue of The Lovecraft eZine. The story that I was assigned to illustrate was 'The First Act', by Pete Rawlik.

After a few read-throughs, my initial ideas were skewed towards a film noir-like image, along the lines of the moodier work created by James Bingham. However, further read-throughs made me realise that an abstract piece of artwork would be needed, mostly because the story itself is a monologue where various imagery is suggested but not always defined; certain pictures are conjured up but details are kept more to a minimum. So, whilst I knew that someone was tied up and that there was the threat of a knife being used, the story didn't detail the whys and wherefores (i.e. were the characters in a room or a basement? Was someone tied to a table or chair?) and so I didn't want to suggest too much outside what the author had already implied.

That said, I did pick up on the idea of the knife, which in turn sparked off a few ideas about what could be the focus for the image. I liked the idea of being quite noirish with the lighting, and so took various backlit photos of my hand holding a knife:

I thought that it was also important to include some sort of visual reference to 'The King In Yellow', as this particular issue of the eZine features stories inspired by that book. I've always liked the artwork for original print of 'The King...', particularly the hardcover version and so wanted to show that in some form:

After various sketches, I settled on an idea that combined these various concepts:

The above piece shows the drawn image in the raw, just to show how things looked before the final image was put together. I wanted to have slightly organic lines radiating out from the central core of the image, and so broke these up into groups of smaller waves, all of which combined to make up a background inpsired by 'The King In Yellow' cover. The knife is chunkier and the hand is taking more of a concerted grip upon it, as the fingers are more tightly curled and suggest something a little more determined.

As I wanted to abstract things a little further, I composited the above drawing within a digital framework using some lines from Act 1, Scene 2 of 'The King In Yellow', which in themselves are oddly abstract:

You can see a larger version of this over at The Lovecraft eZine site. Hopefully it did the story some justice. The drawing itself was done with pen, water-soluable pencil and gouache wash on Bristol Board, the original being around 20 x 14 cm (8ish x 5 inches).

Cthulhu is not an octopus... Part 2

Further to the post that I wrote yesterday, here's an updated scribble of Cthulhu:

This rectifies some of the details in my previous scribble, but I think it needs more work. For example, Cthulhu needs to be more rotund, his thighs need to be longer, and I think his biceps need to be flabbier...

Cthulhu is not an octopus...

Many if not all depictions of Cthulhu tend to show him as an octopus stuck on top of a man's body. Sometimes that body also seems a tad too muscly and superhero-ish, for reasons I can't quite fathom. I've never been all that sure that such depictions are Lovecraftian enough. By that I mean that they tend to be a tad too normal, for want of a better word. 

The great thing about the various creatures created and described by Lovecraft is that they are never run of the mill. Put simply, they're odd. They're a weird amalgam of things, none of which seem particularly human-like (aside perhaps from Deep Ones, but they're cross-breeds). Certain themes tend to flow through Lovecraft's monsters, some of which tend to revolve around an apparent unease with anything fish-related. Other than that, there are tentacles or odd appendages, and hints of mollusc and wings - and that's when Lovecraft isn't completely going off on his own tangent. There isn't anything overtly described as being exactly like any of these things, however. There's just hints and scrabbling by the narrator in order to make some sense of what they're seeing.

Cthulhu is not some sort of buff guy with an octopus for a head. If anything, that tends to sell the description short. One also has to bear in mind that there are drawings of Cthulhu made by Lovecraft himself, such as this one:

Derived from the Wikipedia entry on Cthulhu

The above tends to tally more closely, of course, with Lovecraft's written description. But it also adds more flesh to the idea - in more ways than one. Rather than being a muscled super guy, the surprising thing to me is that Cthulhu is a fat blob of a thing. He has multiple eyes, of a somewhat fishy nature. The legs are almost chicken-like. There are suggestions of things that one can vaguely recognise, but as a whole it's an ugly mass that reminds the viewer of certain shapes but then goes off at a typically Lovecraftian angle. He's only octopid in a very, very vague way and he certainly doesn't have the physique of a Greek god. Okay, you might say that Lovecraft wasn't a great draftsman. I'd say that works in favour of his drawing. He's boiled things down to basic shapes and the basic gist of his mental image seems to be there.

So, taking that as my cue, I decided to rustle up a quick scribble of how this all blends together in my mind:

If anything, with more refinements and redraws I think I can make it all look much more odd in a sense that lines up more with Lovecraft's sketch. My version probably needs to be fatter and more bloated, and the mass of tentacles needs to be longer. But either way it seems that by trying to match that drawing, Cthulhu ends up looking distinctly weird.

He's odd, but he's not an octopus...

Click here for Part Two