Author Archives: skook

Step by Step Mythos Seven 2

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With the sketch approved I finished up the pre-digital work by putting down blacks with ink and more varied shading with my trusty B pencils. And then I scanned it into Photoshop.

Adam, my editor and publisher, had made suggestions for objects that the authors could be holding that relate to their stories. Arthur Machen holds a Black Seal.

Robert Bloch, standing to the right of Machen, holds a skull and has a towel from the Bates Motel over his shoulder. Bloch is probably most known for having written the novel Psycho. I’ve never read Psycho. I tend to prefer my horror fiction to revolve around supernatural menaces rather than the horrors human beings inflict on each other.

Bloch wrote a number of “Cthulhu Mythos” stories, mostly at the beginning of his career. Given the number of horror anthologies I’ve consumed I’ve probably read more than one of them but the one that has stuck in my memory is Notebook Found in an Deserted House. I think I first read it in one of those old Alfred Hitchcock anthologies but a quick googling isn’t turning up any confirmation.

Bloch also wrote Strange Eons, a Mythos novel (if I remember correctly) about Nylarlathotep bringing about the end of the world. I didn’t care much for it when I read it as a teenager. Maybe if I read it now my opinion would be different.

Step by Step Mythos Seven 1

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As you might remember I’ve done the illustrations for Ghouls by Dan Harms, a sourcebook to be published by Sixtystone Press for the Call of Cthulhu RPG. For my last illustration Adam Crossingham, my editor, asked me to do a portrait of the “Magnificent Mythos Seven”, seven authors who influenced and shaped the so-called Cthulhu Mythos into the form we most recognize today. He sent me a bunch of reference photos and I found a few more on the good ol’ internet and then I sketched out the boys. From left to right we’ve got Arthur Machen, Robert Bloch, Robert Howard, HP Lovecraft, August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith and Frank Belknap Long.

Machen didn’t actually write Mythos stories. His writing was, however, a huge influence on Lovecraft’s and Sixtystone Press takes its name from his short story The Novel of the Black Seal in The Three Impostors.

I originally posted this sketch about a year ago so but I’m reposting now because I’m going to do a process series on how I took this piece from sketch to final illustration. I recently did a post on my process over at a Lovecraft illustrators forum that I’ve joined and I’m a big believer in multiple use of both writing and art so I’m sharing the process here as well 🙂

Holiday Pieces

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This was part of a comic strip intended for a Christmas Card for regular clients at the day job back in 2003 or 2004. We tended to run late getting our cards put together. This ran late enough that it wasn’t finished and we mailed store bought cards instead.

Greyduck vs.

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This a pinup I did in 2003 or 2004 for Greyduck a graphic novel about giant monsters done in unique art style. Until this morning, when I went a-googling, I didn’t realize that this book had seen print. I don’t know if my illustration actually made it into the book. I’m going to have to write to Mr. Dang and see. Or buy the book.

Greyduck is the long necked thing. The other beast got invented for the illustration.

Rejected by ME

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Over the years I’ve complained about Epilogue.net rejecting this or that picture. Given that they are a free service I’m not really that upset. Free has its price and if I don’t like it I can go somewhere else. Or get off my lazy butt and build my own danged website.

I’m not saying that I can always tell when one of my illustrations is bad. Usually it’s that I can’t tell if an illustration is really good. That’s why I have other people make the final picks whenever I put together any sort of portfolio. I’m more likely to see the flaws than the merits of an illustration.

Which brings me to today’s post. I did this one intending to post the finished version to Epilogue. But after working on it diligently I finally decided that it … well … kinda sucked. And that nothing I did to it would make it better.

Often times I’ll do an illustration, not like it much and then look at it again years later and find its merits. This one was done in 2003 or 2004 and it still looks like the only way to improve it would be to start from over from scratch.

Sketch for Epilogue.net Submission

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Somewhere on the external hard drive that I use for storage there should be a finished version of this illustration. I originally did it for my Epilogue.net gallery but it was rejected. I no longer remember the exact reason. Too blurry?

Eh. Whatever. At the time I was pretty annoyed. Now I pretty much expect my submissions to get rejected. Even ones that were commissioned and accepted for publication. Most get accepted but I’ve learned not to expect it.

Monster of Piedras Blancas – Revised

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The Monster of Piedras Blancas was a big shocker for me as a kid. It featured a creepy looking monster, at least one onscreen severed head and a dead child. I’d seen other movies with creepy looking monsters but I’m pretty sure this was the first I’d seen with a severed head and a kid killing monster. In the past if monsters killed kids it was accidental i.e. the kid got stepped on while the monster trashed the city. Usually children survived monster attacks.

This is the pre-Photoshopped version of my revision of the creature. The final version can be found in my Epilogue.net gallery.

The (Intelligent Bloodsucking Lumbering) Thing from Another World

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Here is another of the original illustrations I did to build up my gallery at Epilogue.net. This one is a new interpretation of the alien from The Thing from Another World. Since the creature is a mobile sentient vegetable I wanted him (it) to look, well, look like a sentient mobile vegetable. As I wrote elsewhere at the time –

My reworking here was fairly easy. The original monster looks a lot like the Universal Frankenstein monster and it’s supposed to be a kind of ambulatory plant. The biggest thing I had to think about was why a plant would wear clothes. And what would they be made of?

Alien spider silk. With the spiders still in residence. They even repair the outfit when it tears – take a look at the group working on The Thing’s right arm.

And it wears the silk to retain moisture during its travels.

I’m a fan of both versions of The Thing. I don’t really consider the 1980s version a remake. It’s actually a more faithful adaptation of John Campbell’s original story Who Goes There?. Both films use the story’s idea of a thawed alien menacing an isolated base but the 1950’s version chances the nature of the alien and therefore the nature of the story. The final illustration can be found here.

It! Terror from Beyond Space. Or Maybe Just from Mars.

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In 2003 I set up a gallery at Epilogue.net. Of course, a gallery isn’t much good unless it’s got art in it so I got to work creating new illustrations to post. At the time I didn’t have much work that I thought would fit. I had a lot of sketchbooks but most of my finished work was either comics or Labor of Love designs or so old that I didn’t want to post it.

This is a scan of the original art for A Hot Dry Hunger, one of the illustrations in my B-Movie Re-Imagination Project series. BRIP is my occasional foray into redesigning the monsters of old, usually low budget, movies. I try to retain as much of the original design of the creature as possible while letting the design evolve in ways it couldn’t originally because the original costume had to be created cheaply and fit on a human actor.