{"id":10615,"date":"2011-12-13T02:19:25","date_gmt":"2011-12-13T02:19:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=10615"},"modified":"2022-07-13T16:16:55","modified_gmt":"2022-07-13T15:16:55","slug":"cthulhu-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2011\/12\/13\/cthulhu-god\/","title":{"rendered":"Cthulhu God"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"cthulhugod.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Happy Cthulhumas. I found the time over the past couple of weeks to finish a piece of art begun in September 2008, something I’d half-completed then abandoned due to pressure of other work. I’d quite forgotten about this until I discovered the files when going through some archive discs. What began as a pencil outline is now a lavish piece of vector art<\/a> which I’ll shortly be making available as a poster design.<\/p>\n

\"cthulhugod2.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ve enjoyed creating vector pictures recently, it’s a different discipline to using Photoshop (although the initial art often starts in the sister application), and the hard lines and flat shapes remind me of the similar effects I used to get when I was painting with gouache. Some areas of this piece remain a little too flat but I didn’t want to start shading everything using gradient meshes; if you start down that road you may as well do the whole thing as a Photoshop painting\u2014or a real painting, for that matter. That said, I wouldn’t mind giving this the hyper-realist treatment<\/a> at a later date.<\/p>\n

\"cthulhugod3.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The original idea was to do a kind of “Cthulhu Buddha”, something like the above variation only coloured with more finesse. I kept thinking this was an original idea only to belatedly realise when I set the figure against a temple background that I’d been imitating the kind of massive Lovecraftian idols that populate the comic strips of Philippe Druillet. The one below is a good example.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"urm.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Urm le fou (1975) by Philippe Druillet.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"miller.jpg\"<\/p>\n

At the Mountains of Madness (1974).<\/em><\/p>\n

My piece also nods slightly to Ian Miller<\/a>‘s Lovecraft cover art<\/a> of the 1970s. I always enjoyed the tiny human figures in the lower left of this illustration, a detail that makes the viewer realise with a start that the rampaging monstrosity in the foreground is enormous. Needless to say, Druillet favours a similar Piranesian effect.<\/p>\n

Despite having announced at various times that I’m done with illustrating Lovecraft, it’s become apparent that Cthulhu is a convenient riff to use when exploring different styles of art, like the cosmic horror equivalent of a jazz standard. It’s a creature with a high recognition factor yet Lovecraft never went too far beyond his shorthand description of a “squid dragon” outline to fix the shape of the thing. At the end of The Call of Cthulhu<\/em> we discover that Cthulhu has a corporeality sufficiently fluid to reassemble itself after being struck by a steamship. That’s always suggested to me that the artist has licence to interpret the squid dragon formula in a variety of ways.<\/p>\n

As stated above, I’ll be making this picture available shortly at CafePress and another online sales outlet I was recently asked to join, I just need to find the time to jump through the various uploading hoops. More about that later.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 The Lovecraft archive<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Happy Cthulhumas. I found the time over the past couple of weeks to finish a piece of art begun in September 2008, something I’d half-completed then abandoned due to pressure of other work. I’d quite forgotten about this until I discovered the files when going through some archive discs. What began as a pencil outline … Continue reading “Cthulhu God”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,42,9,22,48,26,23],"tags":[2211,104,1687,723,863],"class_list":["post-10615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-books","category-comics","category-horror","category-illustrators","category-lovecraft","category-work","tag-cafepress","tag-cthulhu","tag-hp-lovecraft","tag-ian-miller","tag-philippe-druillet"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-2Ld","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10615"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10615\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}