Platypus of Truth

2015 was a year of difficulties. I spent most of November to July ill. There were several surgeries and a cross-town move. All of those were overcome, however, and on the last day of the year we're still alive and kicking. Not surprisingly, this ended up being the year of tomb stones, art therapy and H.P. Lovecraft. I'm not sure what 2016 will bring. As Counting Crows says "it's been one long December, and there's reason to believe maybe next year will be better than the last..." Whatever befalls, we will keep you up to date here at the Platypus of Truth.

I'm playing with enhancement, filters, and color saturation this morning. I've taken my Blake-Geiger Cthulhu  and run it through the basic Windows 10 editing software to give the drawing a more cosmic feel. Now we can imagine the priest of the Elder Gods winging his way through the voids of oblivion whose soul and messenger is the Creeping Chaos, Nyarlathotep.

Enjoying my break here with a little art therapy. The picture on the left is based on H.P. Lovecraft's "The Shunned House" and has been color adjusted from the original with basic photo editing software. The second picture is my poor attempt to draw of the Plateau of Leng based on the art from Fantasy Flight's Elder Sign: Omens . Both drawings are Prismacolor colored pencils on black sketch paper.

My pastel sketch of R.W. Chambers' The King in Yellow  gets a little help from some very basic Windows 10 photo editing software. I'll keep fiddling with it and see if I can produce any better results for some of my future creative efforts.

So here I am still trying to make Cthulhu scary. I decided to take my own advice and spent some time this morning considering the works of William Blake and H.R. Geiger (not doing that again anytime soon. Buyer beware!). I like the result a little better than my last attempt at the master of R'lyeh . I think there's definitely room for improvement, so I'll keep at it until I'm satisfied one way or another. Time for another sanity check!

Hrriches buy you hhhwarriors King Hhhrothgar! Ph33r teh P0ssumz The Dagron comes in the Night! Props to you if this one makes any sense at all. Telemachus' mom has got it going on...

Poor Cthulhu. How do you inspire the necessary dread when you have an octopus for a head? Conan creator Robert E. Howard called H.P. Lovecraft's Call of Cthulhu  one of the great horror stories of the 20th century. It's title character, however, has inspired everything cute and comic from plush toys to Polish political satires. Most depictions of the sleeping elder god come out looking just plain goofy. So here I am trying to to put a little menace back into the master of R'lyeh. Not too great so far... I wanted something a little more William Blake meets H.R. Geiger. Still, I think it's more faithful to the dragon-octopus-man Lovecraft envisioned than the lion's share of what I've found on the net. 

This is a return to H.P. Lovecraft's short story "Through the Gate of the Silver Key" done with French pastel pencils I received as an early Christmas present. Here, Carter passes through the Gate of the Silver Key only to find himself enmeshed in webs of Yog Sothoth.

Concept art from the Ronald Fairfax novel "The Place of the Skull" currently in the editing process: Ronald took a great gasp like a man drowning and heaved over onto his side.  The element in the space heater glowed.  Forms of tennis shoes and piled books intruded on the faint line of orange light.  Ronald breathed deep again: in then out, in then out.  God help me.  God let me get some sleep.  I have to sleep.   He’d had nightmares for months after what had happened last December.  Now, they only came intermittently.  He’d been afraid, so afraid, that he’d wake up one night screaming and be unable to stop.  He could scream now –scream and scream- and no one would hear.  Ronald swallowed hard.  He wasn’t going to scream.  He didn’t want to.  It was over.  Deliberately turning away from the light, Ronald pulled the covers over his head and shut his eyes.  Think of something pleasant.  Go to sleep. ...

Today's drawing is inspired by the H.P. Lovecraft short story Hypnos  and too many rounds of Fantasy Flight's Elder Sign: Omens . Here, we catch a glimpse of an other world beyond the walls of sleep and human consciousness. Prismacolor pencils on sketch paper (30 minutes).

From time to time we all find ourselves in need of safe harbor. Life in the world means stormy seas as we sail our little ships from island to island in search of new opportunities. Like Odysseus, we need to find a haven when the wind and waves come without forgetting our ultimate destination, our home. What's required is metis , or cunning; the ability to size up a situation and act wisely in uncertain times. After all, God will not do for us what we must do for ourselves. The cosmos is vast and complex, and even the rescue of one person adrift on a tiny raft has consequences for the whole. While we are nothing without God, we still have our parts to play in not compounding the pains of a broken world by adding our own foolishness to it. Instead, we use metis  to move from haven to haven until we find our home making the best use of what God gives us: the bad as well as the good. So here I am, reading Homer's Odyssey and listening to Haven by Kamelot. It's a little safe ...