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January 25, 2011
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:iconnocturnalsea:
Yes, Cthulhu.
Like many out there, I'm a fan of the work of neurotic, verbose, comically-racist but brilliantly creepy New Englander H.P. Lovecraft.
One thing that's always kind of bothered me about Cthulhu is that, for an eldritch cosmic horror, he seems remarkably Earth-like. Especially compared to some of the crazier stuff HPL came up with (the Colour Out of Space, The Great Race of Yith, the Dunwich Horror). He's basically a fat, green guy with bat wings and an octopus head.
For this piece I tried to imagine him as a more alien creature while still staying within the constraints of his description in "The Call of Cthulhu". Here he's actually a colonial organism like a siphonophore with specialized "zooids" that have evolved to serve as "head", "limbs", "wings", etc. I'll post a more complete depiction of his whole body later. For now enjoy this t-shirt design I created (shirt picture to follow, too).
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:iconmr-author:
~mr-author Jun 21, 2011
Ah, I like this one a lot! I like that this one isn't a man with an octopus for a head.
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:iconthomastapir:
*thomastapir Jan 25, 2011
Very, very cool...I was mulling something similar (a colonial organism with various specialized "modules") a while back as a possible explanation for the anatomically disparate Yithians. (Wait a second, was that a comment I made on one of your earlier pieces?!) Anyway, fantastic work...The wings actually remind me a bit of the Elder Things' (and TIE fighters, too! :lol:).
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:iconnocturnalsea:
~NocturnalSea Jan 25, 2011  Professional Traditional Artist
Thanks for the compliments.
I meant the wings to be the tentacles of the wing-zooids stretched out with membranes between them. I figured they would be solar sails since convential wings wouldn't work in space, what with their being no atmosphere to push against (although I think during Lovecraft's time they thought space was full of aether or phlogiston or something).
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:iconthomastapir:
*thomastapir Jan 25, 2011
What a cool idea--the "zooid membranes" stretched between the tentacles, that is.
Yeah, I remember Barlowe justifying the Elder Things' space flight in terms of light pressure on the wings from solar wind. I also like Sandy Petersen's explanation in the Call of Cthulhu game--assuming an orthodox cosmological model (space is a true vacuum), but that beings like Cthulhu, the Mi-Go, etc., being "trans-cosmic," have wings that press against an ether-like medium in a dimension coterminous with our own space.
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