I have been kicking the different images around for the Cthulhu character for half my life. Sounds pretty crazy but it is completely true. For the most part I have been in agreement with the various concepts that have been painted and published over the years. It was after I saw the character Davey Jones in the Walt Disney block buster “The Pirates of the Caribbean”  that I put a concentrated focus on the reconstruction an image from the text. I have become a Lovecraft fundamentalist. Nothing against Davey Jones, he is bad ass and beat Cthulhu to Hollywood claiming the character’s face along the way. The Story “The Call of Cthulhu” is only like 30 pages, and I have read better short stories, but this character created its own mysterious sub-culture that has fed artist, poets, and gamers for generations. He has become the patron saint of open ended creativity. That is a pretty impressive feat for a character to pull off considering they are only vaguely described in the text. Cthulhu is so endeared to the artist’s hand that Lovecraft himself couldn’t help a few sketches. His sketches are of the statue idol of the seated Cthulhu from the story and not of the creature it’s self. Pouring over the text I outlined dimension of the idols in another post. Ultimately I came to the realization that the two different looking idols representing the same character could only mean that the characters shape could shift and transform. The “Outline of the creature in clay”, “something beyond words”, is how Lovecraft describes the art that portrays the creature Cthulhu in the story.  Artists have had free interpretation of the creature because it is never directly described first hand in the story. The great and diabolically evil denizen of hell, priest of the elder gods, has been marketed as cute little stuffed animals all shape and sizes, which I love by the way, and books of artwork from the nightmarish to the humorous are for sale now to an ever-expanding consumer. I have been influenced greatly by the Pop-art Cthulhu concepts as they are obvious in my studies.

I read Call of Cthulhu when I was a teenager and it had a long term effect on my imagination. It is only about 30 pages and is here if you want to read it.  This alien place is older than humanity and was heaved from the bottom of the sea to the surface by a supernatural earthquake. It is a cyclopean landscape covered in green ooze.

I was really stuck trying to figure out what to do for this week’s concept, I wanted to create something completely new that I could use as a prop in some renders. It  was a tough decision, I started drawing guns and thinking of vehicles, but I wanted to do an indoor scene to practice some of the rendering techniques using Mental Ray that I have recently been introduced to. When I am not sure what to draw I run through a list that always generates thumbnails, in order, D&D, Rifts, and last but certainly least, the macabre world of Lovecraft.