Well for today the magic tupperware told me to draw one of the current stars of Japanese Urban Legends, the Jinmenken! AKA the Human Faced Dog. I knew next to nothing about these ones… other than people claiming they saw… or had a friend who saw them, but I’m up for a challenge
When I finally did this they didn’t come off, quite as creepy as I expected. Weird but not creepy.
Wow it’s day’s like this I regret not smoking because after pictures like this one I feel like I need a cigarette!
So today I got to do Edgar Allen Poe’s classic tale of human decadence and divine justice, The Mask of the Red Death!
This was fun… I probably took more time on this due to the size of the crowd… and despite my opinion on some of the choices Roger Corman made in his classic adaptation I couldn’t resist making Prince Prospero look just a little bit like Vincent Price.
I regret not having any place to put the clock.
And speaking of Vincent Price, enjoy his reading of the original story:
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.
