{work} – { feuilleton }

Cthulhu’s new labyrinth

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

Weekend links 845

Cover design by Jim Jupp, art by Arik Roper.

• New music: Sorcery by Belbury Poly, or “The Belbury Poly” as the credit on the cover art has it. The description of the forthcoming release says “it grew from [Jim] Jupp’s love of early to mid-80s electronic music and a rediscovery of how that music had soundtracked his childhood love of all things sci-fi and fantasy. It’s moody and melodramatic electronica rendered in bright and evocative 80s sounds.” And concerning the cover art there’s this: “Some may notice the typographical nod to Mayflower Books’ Michael Moorcock novels.” Indeed.

Cover art by Rodney Matthews, 1977.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827) by Jane C. Loudon, and The Place Called Dagon (1927) by Herbert S. Gorman.

• More new music: Materia by Julia Holter; Avaeken by Stephen O’Malley; Witchcraft & Black Magic In The United Kingdom by Various Artists.

• The Natural History Museum presents competition photos from Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

• This week I drew a new header design for the Endless Bookshelf website.

• At the BFI: Brogan Morris chooses 10 great films about screenwriters.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Palimpsest Day.

• RIP Tim Curry and Yayoi Kusama.

• Sorcery #1 (1974) by Jack DeJohnette | Sorcerer (1977) by Tangerine Dream | Return Of The Sorcerer (2011) by The Wounded Kings

Lovecraft’s Brood

It’s that man again, or some of his progeny, infecting the world with their nightmares. Lovecraft’s Brood is a story collection edited by Ellen Datlow, a kind of follow-up to Lovecraft’s Monsters, although the new book is a more expansive take on the Lovecraftian weird tale. As with the earlier collection, I designed and illustrated this one throughout. The illustrations were more of a challenge this time since the stories weren’t always focused on explicitly physical threats; or if they were, the threats remained either unseen or inexplicable. That can be good sometimes—there’s a tendency in horror illustration to always go for monster portraits or spoilerish scenes from the end of the story—but it doesn’t make the artist’s task an easy one. For a few of the pictures I used a minor detail; in the case of Mister Ainsley, for example, there’s a mention of taxidermy experiments which is what I chose to focus on. What “Mister Ainsley” looks like (or actually is) is never described as such, the reader’s imagination is left to fill the gaps in the story.

Among the other pictures there’s my first ever drawing of the real church that gave Lovecraft his model for the home of The Starry Wisdom cult in The Haunter of the Dark. This church, or its fictional counterpart, has haunted my imagination for a long time, being the subject of my first Lovecraft illustration in 1979 and (of course) the subject of my first Lovecraft comic strip in 1986. In Lovecraft’s Brood the church appears in The Beholder’s Share, another fine riff on Lovecraft’s fiction by Caitlín R. Kiernan in which the Starry Wisdom cult actually existed, with the old Catholic church on Federal Hill being the centre of their operations. The real church was demolished in 1992 but the location is still easy to find since the grounds have been turned into a small recreational area which retains the walls that surrounded the building. When I was in Providence in 2015 I walked over to Federal Hill to see a concert performance in a converted cinema but I didn’t manage to visit the site of the church, something I now regret.

On the technical side, this set of illustrations is the first where I’ve used Glitch Lab in the creation of some of the artwork. Glitch Lab is one of several tablet-based image-processing apps made by Ilixa that function like Photoshop’s filters but with many more options. Photoshop hasn’t done much with its basic suite of filters since the 1990s, something that doesn’t bother me most of the time but every so often you find yourself wanting to imitate a technical effect that can’t easily be achieved without a lot of work. For two of these illustrations I wanted views seen through different kinds of monitors, the first a low-quality TV screen of a type you’d see in a supermarket, then a distorted image from a malfunctioning camera whose output is being viewed on a computer monitor. Glitch Lab specialises in this kind of technical distortion, and can imitate a wide range of visual glitches of a type generated by old TV sets. The Note is the story with the security camera for which I painted a relatively minimal greyscale scene. This wouldn’t have worked on its own but running it through the filters gave it the required appearance. Wind Come Down the Mountain is much more heavily processed, and could have been pushed a lot further but I’d already destroyed a lot of the detail I’d put into the picture.

Lovecraft’s Brood is out now in print and digital from Tachyon and all the usual outlets.

Once Seen by Conrad Williams.

Mister Ainsley by Steve Rasnic Tem.

Continue reading “Lovecraft’s Brood”

Stone Elegy

A new piece of work which I completed recently, this is a poster for a short film, Stone Elegy, written and directed by Shane Smith. The film is a drama set in Ireland during the Iron Age, with a narrative that encompasses lost love, armed conflict and a touch of magic. The brief from Thin Veil Pictures was for something in the style of the cover I created for Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire, a window-like frame of multiple panels in which various figures and details from the story could be seen. The Moore cover is very hard-edged and brightly coloured, going deliberately for a stained-glass window effect. The director and producer liked the formal frame but wanted the look of the poster to be darker, softer and more diffuse which has led to my doing this in a much more painterly style than I’d normally use. I’m very pleased with the results (as are the film-makers), in part because achieving this look with digital tools is no longer the chore I’ve felt it to be in the past. This has been achieved by a great deal of trial and error over the past few years, fine-tuning a small range of digital brushes that now behave in the ways I’d want a regular paintbrush to behave. One thing you never want when drawing or painting is to feel that the tools are getting in your your way.

Stone Elegy was a crowd-funded project so the poster is being used in part as a reward for the backers of the film. The print version will have the credits running at the foot of the poster. There’s a teaser for the film here (actually a self-contained piece), and a proper trailer here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore

The Father of Serpents

The legend of Yig, Father of Serpents, remained figurative no longer, and I started with loathing when told of the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth. — The Whisperer in Darkness

Another month, another Lovecraftian portrait. Yig was the last of the Photoshop melanges from 1999 that I felt a need to replace for the new edition of The Haunter of the Dark, which means that the whole of the Great Old Ones section of the book is now complete. Back in 1999 I wasn’t really sure what to do with Yig. The snake god described as “the Father of Serpents” was partly an invention of Zealia Bishop who paid HP Lovecraft to flesh out a trio of outlines which were subsequently sold as stories to Weird Tales.

Illustration by Hugh Rankin, 1929.

The first of these, The Curse of Yig, was published in November 1929, and credited to Zealia Brown Reed as Bishop was then known. The piece is essentially a revenge scenario in which a woman in the wilds of 19th-century Oklahoma has to suffer the supernatural consequences when she kills a nest of rattlesnakes, consequences which, as in The Dunwich Horror, result in monstrous births. The god that protects the snakes is described in Native American tellings as “an odd half-anthropomorphic devil of highly arbitrary and capricious nature”. Lovecraft typically expands the scope of the tale with suggestions that Yig is connected to the Aztec and Mayan myths of Quetzalcōātl and Kukulkan. The “Father of Serpents” is more corporeal than Lovecraft’s nebulous interdimensional entities but Yig was quickly added to the Mythos pantheon, being named along with Cthulhu and Shub-Niggurath in another Bishop/Lovecraft story, The Mound.

My 2015 illustration for Rattled by Douglas Wynne.

For my 1999 portrait I used a number of old snake illustrations that I collaged and mutated until they formed an appropriate composition. As with some of the other portraits in this section of the book, the final piece looked okay for the time but my satisfaction with it didn’t last. The new version is based in part on an earlier portrait of Yig that I drew in 2015 for Rattled, a story by Douglas Wynne that was published in The Gods of HP Lovecraft. Wynne’s story is closer to The Curse of Yig than to Lovecraft’s more cosmic excursions, and required a suitably earthbound illustration.

The new portrait follows the form of several of the other Great Old Ones pieces by being hieratic and almost completely symmetrical. Our bodies are generally symmetrical but absolute symmetry is a rare thing in nature, which may explain why you see it so often in religious art. Perfect symmetry suggests a supernatural purity that can’t be achieved outside mathematics, thus an ideal quality for the depiction of supernatural entities.

The Sephiroth chart from the second edition of the book, 2006.

If you’re a regular reader you’ll know by now that The Great Old Ones was a collaboration with Alan Moore in which Alan mapped the Mythos gods across the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, while also writing an occult evocation for each. Yig is placed at Tiphereth, the sphere of beauty, which occupies an important central position on the Kabbalistic Tree. I remember Alan being surprised and pleased when I sent him a print of the artwork which had a radiant halo of snake tails positioned at the top of the picture. I didn’t know that Yig was going to be assigned to Tiphereth but the snake halo is a fitting symbol for a sphere associated with the Sun, and whose corporeal symbol is a splendid king. My new portrait acknowledges these aspects while bearing in mind that the Great Old Ones are closer to the demonic entities of the Qliphoth than to the traditional god forms of the Kabbalah. The new Yig has a spiky crown and a multitude of arms that correspond with the position of Tiphereth at the intersection of multiple Kabbalistic paths. (The arms also refer to the multi-armed Christ-like figure that I drew for the Tiphereth page in the Bumper Book of Magic.) As for the wings, these may be taken as a nod to Quetzalcōātl, the Feathered Serpent who happens to be named in Alan’s accompanying text. It’s not necessary for a reader to catch any of these references to appreciate either the text or the artwork but the details add a layer of additional meaning for the initiated.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• 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