This illustration didn’t make it into the final gamebook. Not enough space.
Category Archives: mythos
Mansions of Madness – George and Wilfred
Earlier this year I got an assignment from Chaosium to illustrate a new scenario in their reissue of the gamebook Mansions of Madness. I’ll be showing the preliminary sketches for those illustrations over the next few days.
Great Cthulhu
Because everybody’s got to draw Cthulhu once or twice.
Elder Thing Biosphere
H.P. Lovecraft created the Elder Things in his short novel At the Mountains of Madness. They were/are an alien race that colonized the Earth millions of years before Man. Based on human interpretations of their hieroglyphs the Elder Things might have created life on this planet. They might even have evolved humanity as a slave species. While on Earth they co-existed (and warred) with other intelligent alien species. Eventually they fell into decline, eventually becoming almost extinct on this planet.
The Elder Things came from another world. They evolved somewhere, they had a native biosphere. These two critters are attempts to imagine what other creatures might have lived on that home world.
Alienness
If I remember correctly (this sketch is from 2003) the four tentacled thing at the bottom left is a member of one of the alien races that populate Cthulhu Mythos stories. Unfortunately I’m not sure where my copy of the Encyclopedia Cthulhiana is at the moment and I haven’t been able to find a species in Cthulhu Mythos Wikipedia entries that seems to match so we’ll just have to leave the creature anonymous.
Gyaos and Glaaki
NPCs
On the right we have Professor Grant Emerson. The professor is an NPC (non player character) who writes scientific articles on weird phenomena for The Black Seal. Graeme Price writes the actual articles.
On the right is … I forget what her name is. She was to be an NPC who wrote about weird phenomena from a scholarly perspective. She was a librarian with access to the vast resources of the British Library (although probably not to the Forbidden Books, the hideous tomes that the Library doesn’t admit to owning and never loans out). Unlike Professor Emerson she was to be a house name at the Seal and could have her articles written by anyone with an inclination.
Once I’d done these portraits I was inspired to do portraits of all the Seal’s contributors as a way of blurring that line between reality and fiction. Emerson and the Librarian were to have their portraits and bios on the contributors’ page along with all the rest of us.
So far the Librarian’s skills have gone untapped.
Crawling Chaos
Nyarlathotep is one of H.P. Lovecraft’s more active creations. He (she, it) has a multitude of avatars. He gets involved with humanity. He pays attention to what we do. He plays with us. The rest of the Great Old Ones take as much notice of us as we do of ants.
The finished version of this is in my Epilogue gallery.
Be Careful What You Summon Up
Another sketch from the 2002 section of the sketchbook. Apparently this gentleman is summoning up something unpleasent. Whether the unpleasentness will be turned outward or reflected back I couldn’t say.
The Ghost Pirates – Before
This sketch was inspired by William Hope Hodgson‘s The Ghost Pirates. Hodgson is one of those frustrating authors who has great ideas but is hard to recommend to anyone because he’s not a lot of fun to read. His best work is in short stories. The longer the story the more needlessly dense and repetitive the prose. If you’ve seen Attack of the Mushroom People you’ve seen an adaptation of one of Hodgson’s best short stories The Voice in the Night.
I finished a version of this in Photoshop that was then rejected by Epilogue.net. I’ll post that tomorrow.
