Today’s inktober challenge was easy, or more accurately I couldn’t ‘t think of anything to do, besides just draw the manticore I was supposed to.
Nothing to really say about it other than a quick refreshing of the memory told me that the bat wings are a new innovation, so I left them out. (I missed the part where they said the same thing about the scorpion tail.
As I mentioned in my first Halloween sketch challenge, one of my greatest desires is to make mermaids scary again. This is easier said then done because most people are distracted by the sexy while forgetting that’s just what the mermaids want you to do. For me the scariest mermaid scenes are not the ones where the mermaids drop the glamour and reveal a mouth full of sharp teeth and claws, It’s the subtle ones like in Hunter Thompson’s The Rum Diary where the beautiful woman appears almost from nowhere leaning against your boat and you wonder how since you’re nearly a mile out from shore.
Unfortunately it’s hard to capture that kind of subtlety in one image… but I try.
It was a busy day yesterday which include anticipating a big storm, that turned out to be a false alarm. That’s my excuse for not posting this until now… Mia Culpa!
So anyway on my this years list I had two cat entries and planned to toss the second one once I pulled one to avoid repetition. I was really hoping today’s topic, H.P. Lovecraft’s Cats of Ulthar would be the second.
While The Cat’s of Ulthar is a great story as far as the mythos is concerned it’s little more than a footnote, and I wasn’t sure that I would capture the level of scariness.
On a side note I kind of screwed up on this one. I reread the story after I did the story and was reminded that Ulthar was just a small town in the dreamlands… not the city I show here… The best excuse I can give is that this is Ulthar a few hundred years after the original story happened.
I wasn’t sure about today’s picture, because quite frankly I’ve never found spiders scary. My father is an ecologist who studies crab spiders (he’s sited in the article I just linked) he used to pay me and my sister a 25 cent bounty for all the ones we could find. Creepy cobwebs on the window were a spectator sport and we used to feed them. I’m one of those people who lets the spiders out of the house when I find them in the kitchen.
So whenever I see movies like Tarantula and Eight Legged Freaks I laugh and nitpick the science.
But a lot of people are creeped out by them so I guess that makes them fair Halloween game.
For the thirteenth day of Inktober we have one of the great ogres of Northwestern Native American Folklore, Dzunukwa aka Basket Woman aka the Whistling Woman.
Dzunukwa is an interesting figure in Kwakwaka’wakw mythology on one side she’s a bogey figure meant to keep children out of the forest for fear of being captured and put her basket to be eaten. but at the same time she is occasionally seen as a wise woman and an ancestor figure for the Namgis clan.
She’s a common feature in native art I see every time I browse in galleries every time I go downtown. So it was fun to try and create a “real” version of the wooden masks.
When the magic Tupperware told me I was I had to draw a vampire I was almost tempted to cheat and see if it had something better to offer. I’v already done vampires two years in a row and for the most part They don’t really offer much in the way of a challenge creatively. A friend of mine had suggested that I look at this as an opportunity to try examples of vampires in different folkloric traditions. But the whole point of this exercise is to knock off an idea with no prep time and I couldn’t think of anything. So I pretty much went back to basics of a classic vampire coming out of his coffin.
