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.
I was relieved to hear that all dogs go to heaven; Ramz had me kind of worried. This painting is of Ramz in heaven, painted to celebrate my discovery. I wonder what they do with all the evil dogs up there. Sketches of Ramses have peppered my sketchbooks for the last 10 years; my wife will confirm that he was indeed a natural model if there ever was one. I was very fond of this canine friend. A contemporary, Clint Claussen, once dubbed Ramz, “the Best circler in Council Bluffs”.
I jammed out to some good jams and started sketching away on my new copy of Sketchbook Pro 2010 by Autodesk. I didn’t know what I would end up with when I started, but I wanted to experiment with the programs X Y symmetry and had allot of fun doing it. I always end up in photoshop no matter what program I start with. I look forward to recording more paintings as they develop.
This was a different approach from the way that I have drawn story boards in the past. I usually sketch out everything until it is finished. In this case I quickly sketched out the sequence in my book then set up the scene in Max as a base then painted over. I did this because I can’t quit messing with Max, I am addicted, plus It was an excuse to use the camera and lighting options. I have other ideas of animations that will have to be storyboarded traditionally and I will probably go that route like the Faustition story boards.
Dilemma 2010 was a sketch that I drew for the CG Drawing Jam, “Odd Couple” contest hosted by CGHUB.com. It was based on my very first painting on canvass that I painted over 10 years ago by the same name. What greater “odd couple” I thought, so I spent a few hours sketching it up from scratch. This sketch was also a great chance to get some practice using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 2010. I save some WIPs so that the process could be shared with all of you. Granted, this was only a sketch using digital media, first in Autodesk’s Sketchbook Pro 2010, and finished in Adobe Photoshop, so it was completed in less than 3 hours. I could spend just as much time on this image as I did painting the original, but I have come to learn in the last decade that when it comes to my work, less is truly more. It is really interesting when I think about the differences between the two paintings. The original was tweaked for over 6 months and was not very enjoyable toward completion. I meticulously painted and repainted, scraped away paint with a razor blade, and I began with this work, my own approach to traditional painting. With all of this being said from a concept artist’s stand point it is not much different from the digital sketch. I didn’t use reference for Dilemma 2010 so it seems to have more character and charm; the colors are more dramatic and loose. The content does not change, it is still an angel and some fish dude that for some reason or another are very close. It was a lot of to experiment with the same subject in a different medium, something that I do quite frequently.
