This is the first piece I've had a chance to draw for myself since finishing Marceline back in December (Ouch. I didn't realize it'd been so long!) and it was a bit of sorely needed art therapy for me.It's called Lavinny's Brat and is based off one of my favorite H.P. Lovecraft stories, The Dunwich Horror.
If you are unfamiliar with Lovecraft's body of work, I highly recommend you check it out. The Dunwich Horror can be read in it's entirely here.
If you're too busy for books, there's
a free audiobook version available.
The majority of this piece was completed traditionally, with Prismacolor colored pencils on toned Canson MiTentes paper. I pushed it as far as I could, until I realized I could go no further without digital help. After scanning it in, I was able to add a far more subtle range of shadows and lighting effects via Photoshop.
Lovecraft's vivid and otherworldly imagery seems tailor-made for illustrative interpretations. I enjoyed working on this piece immensely (the difficulties with watercolor paper not withstanding) and I'm looking forward to creating another one when my work schedule allows for it. The next piece will most likely be based on The Color out of Space, since the bleak meteor poisoned farmscape he describes in that tale is just too perfectly bizarre not to try to reproduce.
I learned many important things
during the course of this project:
1. Watercolor paper has a good side and a bad side. To confuse these sides is to court disaster. I started this piece months earlier, realized after hours and hours of work that I'd accidentally used the wrong side of the paper and that it would accept no more color (either with paint or pencils) without tearing completely. I was so frustrated by the whole affair that I had to put the piece aside for a while until I was no longer sick of looking at it.
This is as far as I got in my first attempt before the paper started to come apart.
2. Whippoorwills, which feature prominently in a lot of Lovecraft's lore and especially in any story relating to Dunwich, are extremely sinister looking little creatures! Seriously, take a look at that guy. You don't want him perched outside your window.
3. It is extremely difficult, when depicting a person with albinism, to convey they fact that they are more than just extremely fair. There is a very fine line between looking albino and just looking blonde.
4. Speaking of difficult, it's tough to illustrate Lovecraft's work without highlighting the heavy omnipresent racism heheld towards pretty
much everybody.
Although Lovecraft wrote most of his work during the 1920's, when it was common to harbor racist feelings towards asians and blacks and immigrants of all sorts, it's not really accurate to say that his racism was just a product of the times. Lovecraft went the distance. He's so racist it's just absurdly silly after a while.
He hated ethnic groups no one else ever seemed care about, like Alsatians and Polynesians and eskimos and the Dutch. Everything's about decaying bloodlines with this guy. He hated sailors and hillbillies and anyone else who he thought might be breeding in "unnatural" ways.
I tried really hard to keep little baby Wilbur from looking like a stereotype of african descent, even though certain details of his physical description required me to stray dangerously close to a xenophobic caricature. I hope I succeeded.