Hiatus

I realize that it's been over a month now with no updates from me. The reason for this is that I have injured my back. Sitting in a position which allows me to use my hand to create is extremely painful right now, and I can not create when pain is the only thing I can think about, so I am taking a hiatus from artwork until my back heals sufficiently. This could be a few weeks to a few months, but is NOT a permanent condition. The doctor believes I have a ruptured disk in my lower spine, which should heal completely in due time with proper therapy and rest and medication. An X-ray has proven useless in diagnosing this injury, but I have scheduled an MRI for the end of July to see how things are progressing. Medication is another factor, now that I think of it, in preventing me from creating. It is hard to access that creative part of your brain when the pain-diminishing drugs you need to stay sane have the side effect of keeping you in a dreamlike stupor. On the positive side, it is an artist's prerogative to have vivid and strange dreams as a result of using such powerful drugs, and I'm sure that I will come through all this with some wonderful new inspiration once all is said and done. So if you have come to expect more from me, please be patient and believe me when I say that I do have many more great ideas building up in the pipeline, but they will simply have to be on hold for a while. ~K.L. Turner

Dimensional Shambler

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"Shuffling toward him in the darkness was the gigantic, blasphemous form of a black thing not wholly ape and not wholly insect. Its hide hung loosely upon its frame, and its rugose, dead-eyed rudiment of a head swayed drunkenly from side to side. Its fore paws were extended, with talons spread wide, and its whole body was taut with murderous malignity despite its utter lack of facial expression." -H.P. Lovecraft & Hazel Heald, The Horror In the Museum


If you wish to follow my other work and/or see the occasional work in progress in addition to the finished pieces posted here, you may follow me at http://eclectixx.deviantart.com/

Hound of Tindalos

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"The nature of the Doels was plainly revealed, and I was told the essence (though not the source) of the Hounds of Tindalos."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Whisperer In Darkness

"Beyond life there are'—his face grew ashen with terror—'things that I cannot distinguish. They move slowly through angles.'"
"'All the evil in the universe was concentrated in their lean, hungry bodies."
"'God, they are breaking through! They are breaking through! Smoke is pouring in from the corners of the wall. Their tongues—ahhh—"'
Frank Belknap Long, The Hounds Of Tindalos


If you wish to follow my other work and/or see the occasional work in progress in addition to the finished pieces posted here, you may follow me at http://eclectixx.deviantart.com/

Deep One

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"I think their predominant color was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked ... They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design - living and horrible."
-H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Over Innsmouth

If you wish to follow my other work and/or see the occasional work in progress in addition to the finished pieces posted here, you may follow me at http://eclectixx.deviantart.com/

Star Spawn

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This is not the infamous Cthulhu himself, but a representation of one of his kindred. Sometimes referred to as "StarSpawn," they are more or less described as an octopus-like race which descended from the stars.

"Another race - a land race of beings shaped like octopi and probably corresponding to fabulous prehuman spawn of Cthulhu - soon began filtering down from cosmic infinity and precipitated a -monstrous war which for a time drove the Old Ones wholly back to the sea..."
-H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains Of Madness

If you wish to follow my other work and/or see the occasional work in progress in addition to the finished pieces posted here, you may follow me at http://eclectixx.deviantart.com/

Shoggoth

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"“We were on the track ahead as the nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus; gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, re-thickening cloud of the pallid abyss-vapour. It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us," -H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

Shoggoths are large, amorphous and amoeba-like. They can form mouths, eyes, and various appendages at will. They were genetically designed by an ancient race of alien life on Earth. Originally aquatic in nature, the shoggoths learned to live on land and eventually destroyed their ancient masters.



If you wish to follow my other work and/or see the occasional work in progress in addition to the finished pieces posted here, you may follow me at http://eclectixx.deviantart.com/

Ghast

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"After a moment something about the size of a small horse hopped out into the grey twilight, and Carter turned sick at the aspect of that scabrous and unwholesome beast, whose face is so curiously human despite the absence of a nose, a forehead, and other important particulars." "...the ghasts, those repulsive beings which die in the light, and which live in the vaults of Zin and leap on long hind legs like kangaroos."
H.P. Lovecraft, Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath


If you wish to follow my other work and/or see the occasional work in progress in addition to the finished pieces posted here, you may follow me at http://eclectixx.deviantart.com/

Flying Polyp

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[The flying polyps were a] horrible elder race of half polypous, utterly alien entities... They were only partly material and had the power of aerial motion, despite the absence of wings... [They exhibited] a monstrous plasticity and ... temporary lapses of visibility... [S]ingular whistling noises and colossal footprints made up of five circular toe marks seemed also to be associated with them.
—H. P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow Out of Time"

The Flying Polyps were banished to their underground cities and trapped there by the Great Race of Yith.

If you wish to follow my other work and/or see the occasional work in progress in addition to the finished pieces posted here, you may follow me at http://eclectixx.deviantart.com/

Nightgaunt

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“Shocking and uncouth black beings with smooth, oily, whale-like surfaces, unpleasant horns that curved inward toward each other, bat-wings whose beating made no sound, ugly prehensile paws, and barbed tails that lashed needlessly and disquietingly. And worst of all, they never spoke or laughed, and never smiled because they had no faces at all to smile with, but only a suggestive blankness where a face ought to be. All they ever did was clutch and fly and tickle; that was the way of night-gaunts.”
—H. P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

If you wish to follow my other work and/or see the occasional work in progress in addition to the finished pieces posted here, you may follow me at http://eclectixx.deviantart.com/

Gug

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"It was a paw, fully two feet and a half across, and equipped with formidable talons. After it came another paw, and after that a great black-furred arm to which both of the paws were attached by short forearms. Then two pink eyes shone, and the head of the awakened gug sentry, large as a barrel, wabbled into view. The eyes jutted two inches from each side, shaded by bony protuberances overgrown with coarse hairs. But the head was chiefly terrible because of the mouth. That mouth had great yellow fangs and ran from the top to the bottom of the head, opening vertically instead of horizontally."
—H. P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

If you wish to follow my other work and/or see the occasional work in progress in addition to the finished pieces posted here, you may follow me at http://eclectixx.deviantart.com/

Introduction

I've been portraying mythos creatures for many years now, and recently decided to create a Lovecraft mythos bestiary from scratch. Only new works I have designed specifically for this project will be included in it.

There have been countless renditions of Lovecraft's creations, and many of them are very good. Some are more faithful than others to the descriptions given in the original writings, and the quality of work available varies widely. Some attempts to remain accurate and faithful to the descriptions result in visualizations which appear more silly than horrifying. My goal for this bestiary is to remain true to both the letter and the spirit of the writings for each piece.

I will publish my completed works in this blog as I finish them. I have no timeline that I plan to follow, since I tend to ignore such timelines when I set them. I will probably complete one piece every week or so, although there will be periods of time when I am otherwise preoccupied.

At the end of this project I hope to have sufficient completed works to have them published as a book, though I have not yet sought out potential publishers at this time.

If you wish to follow my other work and/or see the occasional work in progress in addition to the finished pieces posted here, you may follow me at http://eclectixx.deviantart.com/

I am open to suggestions for creatures to include in the bestiary. The following creatures have already been requested by others and are planned for inclusion: Shoggoth, Elder Thing, Flying Polyp, Nightgaunt, Tindalos Hound, Ghast, Ghoul, Fungi from Yuggoth.

At this time the plan is to illustrate creatures, not individual characters or deities. I may reconsider this in the future, or make special exceptions; alternately, I may illustrate a separate compendium of individual characters and deities at some future point

My first completed piece is the Gug, and I will start a new post for this piece.