I’m thinking about making this a tradition: at the end of the month, adding any particularly noteworthy doodles or concept sketches or what not up here in a big post. Since I do a lot of concept work through art, these could be considered sneak peeks, if you’re so inclined! Of course a lot are either not good enough to share or represent stuff that’s in progress for release, so this isn’t all of them… but my storage space is limited anyway! So it’s just as well.
Warning for body horror and some non-sexual nudity.
First set of concepts for half-human, half-eldritch monster children, and their normal eldest sister for reference. When I say half-eldritch monster, I mean normal human children warped in utero by eldritch powers, but close enough. From the beginning, I was interested in playing with angelic imagery. I wanted at least one to be very beautiful, but another to be so monstrous and deformed it was pitiful, to remind that the processes that created these children are unnatural and abhorrent. I knew at least one would be heavy on fetal/developmental imagery, even before I started developing their world and story, hence the fetal skull.Second set of concepts. Another monster I wanted to be very specifically mammaloid, because mammals are icky, and to show that the eldritch forces are working with a rather limited toolset to express themselves. The girl in the top left is harmless, if gross, and those flesh-tubes pulse and wiggle like an anemone’s tentacles. They are very delicate and the capillaries are super apparent, but they’re soft and gentle as well. She spawns flowers around her and just wants to be left alone to study the patterns of the stars and cosmic bodies. When she runs, it’s unevenly because of how heavy her feelers are on one side. The Synapsid is a mindless animal (as far as anyone can tell) and yes, each boob jiggles separately and no, it’s not hot. The second born is the most primitive of the siblings, the eldritch powers’ first attempt at sculpting a human being. She’s so powerful she never has to develop, so she stays neotenous her whole life.My second attempt at solidifying the neotenous sister. She is still connected to her placenta, not out of attachment to her mother, but as a symbol of a selfish, uncaring force, the id unhampered by development; the human placenta is an aggressive organ produced by a greedy child to ensure maximum difficulty in spontaneous abortion and to monopolize hormone production in the mother. Embryonic selfishness and eldritch unknowability are a bad mix. More than just a functional body or significant muscle tissue, she never had to develop empathy or altruism to survive; she’ll forever be a monstrous fetus that does whatever it wants and whatever it can to survive, no matter how big she grows.The fifth and most powerful of the sisters, the most perfect of the experiments (as of right now in the design process). Most of the notes about her are included on the drawing. She isn’t aggressive, not especially, and she shows attachment to her siblings and mother, but other than that, it’s anyone’s guess what goes on in her mind. She has another set of eye-wings, but I didn’t want to draw them because then I’d have no room for notes. Her hands are the most obvious clue that what’s going on here is something aping human form, but not entirely familiar with it. They’re iconography of hands, not physical hands meant to do anything except look just handish enough to pass.O, Inanna! It is you who teaches us to die, be reborn, and live again! This isn’t related to any of the above concepts. Eventually I want to color this because a lot of shifts in texture and color are hard to show in just a line drawing. Sheep in a cycle of rebirth and decomposition appear and disappear through the tatters of her skirt, a reference to how this bitch one hundred percent tossed her husband, Dumuzi the shepherd, into the underworld, and how because of her remorse for that, he is allowed to come back sometimes. There’s bird imagery to highlight her connection to Lillitu and other nocturnal, female bird monsters. She wears a ratty, torn-up turban, holds a lapis lazuli measuring rod and cord, and wears a pectoral (called Come, Man, Come!) in reference to her queenly raiments in ‘the Descent of Inanna into the Underworld.’Y’all city slickers think deer are real cute but let me tell you, there is nothing cute about a bigass buck popping out of nowhere in front of your truck in the middle of the night, or one just standing and watching you while you’re walking around looking for poachers or baby goats or whatever. I like deer and all but I like them in the light and with a good stretch of distance between us. Sometimes when I see them I think, wouldn’t it be fucked if that deer had a whole bunch of extra eyes and weird horns? So I drew this.
Frightful/Filthy 