I’m not worried about machines gaining sentience and then deciding to wipe out humanity. Maybe if machines could think they’d decide that we should be exterminated. Or ruthlessly dominated. Maybe they would have other ideas. We won’t know until it happens.
I’m more worried about programming machines to act as soldiers or as law enforcement. Programming has limitations and those limitations will get innocent people killed. The excuse for the tragedy will be, “We couldn’t have foreseen … “
What sort of hungers do the Great Old Ones have?
Lovecraft described some of his creations in great detail. Others are described in ways that are give the reader a vague sense of the thing and leave the specifics to his/her imagination. And others are left as vague eldritch monstrosities, barely comprehensible to the human mind. Shub Niggurath is one of those. So she (it) can be depicted however seems most appropriate.
I did a simple version of this illustration last October for the Drawlloween/Inktober challenge. I liked the results so much that it seemed worth trying again.
Woof.
This is the Ugly Dog of Heaven. He made his first appearance in a minicomic I did with my brother, Glenn, back in 1989. Glenn wrote it, I drew it. That minicomic got reprinted in The Treasury of Mini Comics, volume 1. Most flatteringly, the publisher used a image of him on the spine of the book. 
Glenn later wrote him into segments of his thousand experiment on his Lovesettlement blog: each day for a thousand days he wrote a post of 100 words. If he didn’t finish a sentence one day he’d carry it on to the next. 100 words a day for a thousand days resulted in a 100,000 word stream of consciousness ramble. Is it a novel? An epic prose poem? An incantation to summon strange gods? Yes.
I wonder what sort of sounds these critters would make?
I’ve spent some time over the last four years trying to figure out a graphic novel project that a writer friend and I could collaborate on. I like his writing. He likes my illustration. We never did find a story that we both were willing to invest the time and money to take to completion.
At one point, while working out a possible scene in a possible plot, he asked whether I wanted the protagonist to battle a tyrannosaurus rex or a giant squid. My first thought was “Why not both?” but I think I told him that I preferred a tyrannosaur.
The “Why not both?” thought stuck with me and the “both” element had me decide to combine the two creatures into one. Sorta.
“Words could not adequately convey the repulsiveness of the thing. It was endowed with a trunk and great, uneven ears, and two enormous tusks protruded from the corners of its mouth. But it was not an elephant. Indeed, its resemblance to an actual elephant was, at best, sporadic and superficial, despite certain unmistakable points of similarity. The ears were webbed and tentacled, the trunk terminated in a huge flaring disk at least a foot in diameter, and the tusks, which intertwined and interlocked at the base of the statue, were as translucent as rock crystal.”
One of the reasons that I’m so fond of the so-called Cthulhu Mythos is its breadth and diversity. H.P. Lovecraft may have originated it but it has long since outgrown his writings. Howard Belknap Long was a writer who added to the Mythos during Lovecraft’s lifetime. His most notable creations are the Hounds of Tindalos and the fellow above, Chaugnar Faugn. All of Lovecraft’s work is in the public domain, easily found and therefore easily read. Long’s work is still under copyright and, because Long has not retained a lot of posthumous popularity, requires some effort to track down. As far as I can tell, the Seattle Library has nothing by him in its collections. As such, I haven’t read The Horror from the Hills, the story that first features Chaugnar Faugn.
But what the hell, I have read T.E.D. Klein‘s Black Man with a Horn, featuring a version of Chaugnar Faugn that only vaguely resembles the original, and I felt like drawing an eldritch abomination so … here he is.
Last Sunday I posted my basic sketches for the individual images that I planned to have make up the cover for Tails of Valor. Here’s what I did to turn those images into the final cover illustration.
Using Photoshop I collaged the images in a variety of ways to find a balance that looked good. The version below is number seven.
Once I figured out the basic layout I did a rough sketch that combined all the images in a way that (hopefully) worked together aesthetically. 
Next I did detailed pencils of each scene. We (the book’s editor and I) decided to have me do each scene as a separate image and then have book’s cover designer put them all together for the final product. I regularly combined my working images in order to be sure that I was getting a good balance for the final illustration.
Next I “flatted” images for coloring, meaning I separated out specific areas of each image that I wanted to be able to color individually. At this point I wasn’t necessarily choosing the final colors that I planned to use, just something close.
And then I started adding detailed colors, adjusting colors on specific layers, doing gradients and playing with different brushes. I really don’t have much to say from here on. There was trial. There was error. There was “Hey! That looks good!”
I hopped back and forth between all the illustrations but, in the beginning, I spent most of my time on the Egypt and Rome sections.
I made my biggest post-pencil changes here by moving the jumping cat in the Rome section up in space. The change doesn’t look like much but it makes the scene livelier.
And done. Mostly. I’ve made some tiny adjustments to parts of the illustrations since I created the jpeg below but I’m probably the only person who will notice them. 
Golden Goblin Press will be kickstarting Tails of Valor in July. I’ll put a post about that when the time comes.
