Here in The North the weather is slowly turning against the wearing of T-shirts outdoors but this week I’ve made a new shirt available based on an old design. The first Cthulhu Labyrinth came about when I was putting together pages for a Cthulhu calendar in 2012. In the end it didn’t get used for the calendar but the design stuck around even though I was never entirely satisfied with it. My recent work on the new edition of The Haunter of the Dark has had me going back through all my Lovecraft-related art which prompted me to finally rework the old design into a more satisfying appearance. I’ve come to think of this as a distillation of The Call of Cthulhu into a single graphic: the globe-spanning investigation leads inexorably to the monster sitting spider-like at the centre of its convoluted path. As before, other shirt designs are available, and I can prepare new shirts from old artwork on request.
And since I’ve mentioned the work-in-progress, I thought another progress report was in order. After spending spare moments over the past 18 months reworking pages for The Great Old Ones while also designing new page layouts I’m now fully immersed in the completion of The Dunwich Horror, and very pleased with the way the story is proceeding. I’m still having to work on this as a side project but I feel properly engaged with the story now that I’m working on new pages rather than redrawing parts of old ones. I’ve just finished drawing page 27 which brings the narrative up to the place where the story reveals its apocalyptic scope, when Dr Henry Armitage reads for the first time a portion of Wilbur Whateley’s decrypted diary. I’ve roughed out the next few pages which will bring the story to the beginning of part 9 where I’m hoping the drawing will go more quickly once I’m back in the wilds of Dunwich. The pace is kept to a crawl by my having to match all the fine shading I was doing in the 1980s but shading rural scenes is generally less time-consuming than shading detailed interiors like the one above. The long march to Sentinel Hill continues.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Father of Serpents
• The Black Goat
• Tsathoggua rising
• H.P.L.
• The return of the Crawling Chaos
• Lettering Lovecraft
• Weird ekphrasis and the Dunwich Horrors
• Kadath and Yog-Sothoth
• Another view over Yuggoth
• Nyarlathotep: the Crawling Chaos
Hello from France!
Your feuilleton about Lovecraft’s Randolph Carter stories illustrated by Philippe Druillet made me aware of your blog.
A real treasure for all fans of HPL and other authors of weird tales who also appreciate how artists can illustrated them. Thanks for all!
Hello and merci!
That’s definitely the logo for CTHULHUCORP.
(We feel your pain!)
A new shirt? ‘The King in Yellow?’
Might be a bit too detailed for a logo, it’s better suited for the atrium of a huge office building where it could be inlaid on the floor at walkable size like the one in Chartres cathedral.
Yes, I could do the King in Yellow although I’ve been thinking of updating the drawing a little. It’s going to be in the Lovecraft book near the end in the weird fiction section, and since I put it there I’ve been thinking of adding the wings that Robert Chambers gives the figure on his drawing. I’ve not worked out yet how best to approach this; Chambers’ wings are simple black shapes whereas mine would have to be more realistic.