Tropes versus Lovecraft - Part 4: A Pale Blue Dot

I’ve named this fourth trope (Part 1, 2, 3) of lovecraftian iconography „A Pale Blue Dot“, referencing the title of the famous book by Carl Sagan, as it draws heavily on the sense of isolation and fragility evoked by the image of planet Earth seen from space.
The internal mechanism of this trope is actually very similar to „Under the Surface“(UTS) and „Eye of the Beholder“(EOTB) in that scale, knowledge and perception are crucial factors in it. Obviously, when it comes to the scale difference between humans and the otherworldly entities in the images, here they it is pushed more or less to the limit. We don’t actually see any single human beings but of course we don’t need to, since Earth after all encompasses not only one or a group of individuals, but all of them. While we definitely know what situation humanity is in here, it’s not quite clear wether it itself remains ignorant of the threat (as in UTS) or is aware of it (as in EOTB). Even if it is, it will probably not be able to perceive it as clearly as we can in from our outer space vantage point.

To summarize, this trope and the two before it use very much the same elements to convey the basic lovecraftian philosophical worldview: human existence is threatened by outside cosmic forces next to which they are completely insignificant and which they can only perceive or understand to a very limited degree. Conceptually I think the ones where humans/humanity is not about to be eaten or willfully destroyed are more in line with this outlook because that undermines the entities’ indifference towards us.

I'll start off with one of my own drawings. It’s the cover for a HPL themed comic collection I put out for the CthulhuCon Portland in 2015. At the time I thought that it was a fairly original idea. Only afterwards I noticed other older versions of the same motif, and I 'm seeing newer ones popping up on a regular basis ever since.

 

Like with the other tropes, I'm not saying any of these are swipes (although some may very well be), I do however wonder if it shouldn’t be our goal not to replicate the same ideas again and again until they’ve lost all impact.
On the other hand I find it interesting how a quasi-religious iconography has emerged for Lovecraft’s (or Derleth’s if you will) Mythos, with all its spiritual/philosophical underpinnings. But that’s a topic for another day.

Here's another example of how a trope can become so overused that its ironic version is inevitable.

And a few fun bonus ones.

Final bonus! This is the final scene of the first Men In Black movie... seem familiar?

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Wrestlenomicon

Hello, Ducks! Been working on a pretty big project for me- maybe not in scope, but in quantity of work needed. It's a wrestling card game involving creatures from the Lovecraft mythos, oddly enough. It's fun working on, but I need to do 120 card illustrations (less than halfway done with that) in addition to cover art and card design, which I've already completed. The first two decks are for Cthulhu and Hastur. I don't know much about these types of card games, but I gather that each player gets one deck and then they challenge each other card to card.  Anyway, here are some of the illustrations, which are intended to be comical.

   "Organ Donation." I think they actually expected more comic book-like artwork, so I kind of overdid it style-wise. I'm allowed to use pretty simple backgrounds, though. I'm not sure that the gutted creature in the background reads so well, but I guess it's okay if people notice that only upon closer inspection.

"Nuke to the Ass." There's a lot of butt-related humor involved in these cards. 

   "Glomp Stomp." For some drawings that involved cities, I used cities from all over the world, to show that Cthulhu was an equal opportunity demolisher. I'm still not good at making monsters look huge, so I need to work on that. Just desaturating the color and making them look faded (in this case, more blue) in the distance doesn't seem to do the trick, but it will have to do for now.

 Oh! And Fufu- I heard that my brother, Paul, got to meet you at the Cthulhu thing in Portland! That's great!

Happy Deathday HPL!

... 75th, that is.

Mostly Tentacles

Great new stuff all around on EBD!
I'm awfully busy with commissions right now but at least I managed to do some new Cthulhus for myself. Here's one. I've also posted this one and two more on my Human Mollusk blog, with a couple more to come soon.

Yeah... I'm still doing those

Been working on a bunch of new Cthulhu versions. Here's one based on a yeti.

food chain

A new duo from my Cthulhu series.



On related note, I recently watched "Cthulhu" by Dan Gildark. While it's not a perfect movie, it's definitely one of the better Lovecraft adaptations. It differs from most others in that the monsters play a very subtle role in the movie. They hardly appear at all, and when they do it's more weird than frightening. The movie features great cinematography and a rather Lynchian atmosphere. Also the gay angle was a refreshing theme for a mythos story.

good boy - color

Greetings everyone - I fell into a reality vortex and was sucked out of the spacetime continuum for a while, so I couldn't post... sorry. Stuck out there in limbo (yes, it still exists no matter what the pope says) among other things I killed time cranking out more of those variations on the Great Cthulhu. Here's one in color:







There's plenty more of the usual black and white ones on the Human Mollusk blog.

There's been a lot of really cool stuff going on EBD, and the fact that our former nemesis Ray Tan is now a member makes me quite suspicious that I've actually returned to a slightly different parallel universe.

...

NNNOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Bug

Here's a color version of one of my recent sketches which I did on a whim last night.

## 41 - 49

I just went to see an exhibit about the history of deep sea exploration, which inspired me to post some recent Cthulhu sketches.

Oh, Great, I'll Be Leaving Now

No Graven Image

Thanks for the comments on my last post everyone. Since Sean and Chris brought it up again, I think I need to clarify a little why I'm not doing the pychedelic/abstract approach with my Cthulhu portraits. In this instance I'm not so much interested in illustrating what Lovecraft tries to convey in his stories. I've written elsewhere on this blog(*), and here I completely agree with you, that I see a great problem with finding imagery for the cosmic existential horror that is at the core of HPL's vision, exactly because it is meant to be indescribable. Portraying it only limits its scope and makes it something familiar. Kind of like there's a prohibition for likenesses of god in most monotheisms. I'm not saying it hasn't been done successfully btw; Aerons photoshop monstrosities are but one example.
But I'm taking the opposite route, starting with Lovecraft's description of a statuette -

A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings [...] It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence...

- and playing around with what the creature which is portrayed here, might look like. It may sound paradoxical, but the series as a whole is basically a comment on how none of the portraits actually can come close to the "real" thing. The series started off when I was playing around with an idea for a comic featuring Cthulhu (as a person, not a nameless horror) and made several sketches of him. The first ones were more or less the stereotypical images you find all over pop culture, so I tried to come up with as many anatomical permutations as possible. Of course, some of them are closer to the description and some of them are fairly different, but you could imagine humans making a statue of something they can't describe more "anthropoid", simply because they're humans themselves, misinterpret antennae as wings and so on.
I'm thinking of making a little book out of the whole series at some point, maybe silkscreen with an additional color or something.


* as far as I remember as a comment to Luke's post about Clark Ashton Smith, which I can't seem to find - was it deleted for some reason?

Grafitti on Non-Euclidean Walls

Cthulhu sketches:













I've added some more finished Cthulhus to the Human Mollusk blog. Here's one I did several months ago and didn't like back then. Perhaps I thought it looked too much like a medieval demon instead of a Great Old One. Looking at it now I don't think it's all that bad, but I'm still not sure it if I should include it in the series.

More of the same - but still sane!

...and some more sketches.

Back from Wherever

Greetings everybody. I'm back from a fairly long period of static. My pause was due to a relocation to Berlin after which I haven't had a working internet connection for ages.
I've been lurking now and then from internet cafés but just didn't find the time to post something. It's great to see so much really cool new stuff.
Also: Welcome newcomers!

Here's a recent cthulhu drawing.



I've been working on several of them over the last months, and will post them when I get them scanned. In the meantime here are some preliminary sketches, as a foreshadowing of what's to come. I inverted them on a whim, because I thought it looks kinda cool.













And two more drawings from my current sketchbook:





Finally, while offline I've worked on a new website a bit. It's not finished yet, but check it out if you like, I would be glad to get some feedback.