A lot of the monsters that I draw have been heavily influenced by the original members of the Lovecraft circle, and other authors, such as Brian Lumley, who were either inspired by or attempted to emulate Lovecraft.
Of all the stories written by Lovecraft, there are two which I can read over and over again, The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Lurking Fear, of those two, my favorite has to be The Lurking Fear. I know there are people out there who think I'm crazy for preferring any other Lovecraft story over The Shadow Over Innsmouth, but, in all honesty, even though I find gills creepy, I don't find fish all that scary. Human de-evolution and incest are far creepier to me. Yes I suppose that The Shadow Over Innsmouth is technically a story about de-evolution, but human de-evolution into a monkey like creature, such as takes place in The Lurking Fear is far more believable than a man turning into a fish.
Lovecraft was never very descriptive when attempting to describe one of his creatures, in The Lurking Fear however, he did a pretty good job. In essence the Martense family, due mainly to inbreeding, had de-evolved into small monkey like creatures with long claws designed for digging. On first reading Lovecraft's description of the Martense's I had to sketch out the creature that popped into my head.
This is an OLD drawing, it's from around 2001 I believe, it's also one of the few things from that time that I let anyone see. A lot of the art I did until around 2003 is frankly embarrassing, one of the best things I ever did was to marry a woman who was willing to point out the bad things and errors in my art that I couldn't see.
About four years ago I decided to re read Lovecraft's Dream Cycle stories. I've never really enjoyed The Dream Cycle stories, they never quite hit my buttons the way Lovecraft's other stories did and I honestly found them to be a bit boring. There were a few scenes from them that stuck in my head, specifically the scene from The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath where Randolph Carter stumbles across the ghoul, who if I remember right is Richard Pickman, setting on top of a grave stone. After re reading that passage I set the book down and sketched this little thing.
This is a very small sketch, less than 4” tall, and it was done on one of my guard sheets. Ah, the guard sheets, gatherers of doodles and refinement sketches. As any artist that works heavily in pencil will tell you, graphite loves sticking to the side of your hand and it smears. Most artists that work in pencil use something to rest their hand on while drawing so that they don't smear graphite all over the picture they're working on, I call this a guard sheet. In my case I use a sheet of paper, folded in half, from the pad that I'm using. If something isn't working out right in the piece I'm working on, I'll sketch out some alterations on the guard sheet to see if I can get whatever the problem is worked out. Also, if inspiration strikes while I'm working on something else, I can sketch it out on the guard sheet and get my mind back to what I was working on. So, my guard sheets tend to gather a lot of small sketches and doodles.
This is Robert Slight
Robert was originally some random thing that popped into my head and never got finished, he received his name after I decided to try and play him as a Freak Legion character in a mixed genera White Wolf game that we were playing. I have a picture of him clothed somewhere, but it seems that I never scanned it, so instead, you get him naked. I initially had fun playing this character, unfortunately, he was a hyperactive, paranoid character, whose high pitched, raspy voice and constant screeches of “MINION” were a bit to difficult to keep up and I had to drop him. I'll see if I can't find a picture of him clothed and get it scanned.
Well, there's three little monsters for you, tomorrow I might post some ladies.
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