Necronomicon Art Journal Project: Azathoth

The inspiration for this journal, beyond, the desire to do something freaking awesome, has been to use my Inktense Pencils to create images of the Lovecraftian ‘monsters’.  I am awed by the fantastic artwork online, and while I will try, I know I will not compare.

There are some pieces that are more detailed than I could ever imagine.  I am envious.

Since I didn’t want to be too skewed in my renditions, I decided to utilize the written descriptions from Lovecraft himself to inspire me.  That’s a bit tough.  He often hides his descriptions behind the narrator fainting or leaving it at too horrible and incomprehensible to describe.  I am not daunted.

So I researched via the interwebs and found A Lovecraftian Bestiary on hplovecraft.com.  Awesome.  And in alphabetical order, hence my start with Azathoth.

Azathoth is described by Lovecraft as, “…that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity—the boundless daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless Other Gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep,” in the The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (I linked to the INJ Culbard adaptation as he has fantastic renderings of the HP’s stories!).

So basically, Azathoth is amorphous, boundless, gnaws hungrily.  Easy to draw.

I cheated a bit and used some inspiration from minds more creative than my own and blended some ideas.  It’s still not as awesome as most, but will look pretty awesome as part of the collection in the art journal.

I started the page by tearing off the edges to get the raw finish.  I then took a mixture of tea and Distress Ink Sprays in Black Soot and Spiced Marmalade in water and applied across the entire page.  I let that dry a bit.

I then started the drawing by adding the tentacles first and then filling in the amorphous blob body.  I didn’t think that the ‘gnawing’ aspect had to mean a mouth, so I used the unseemly glow of the yellow to represent the means of obtaining energy to the core of the beast.  I felt like it needed a little more, so I put ‘claws’ at the end of the tentacles and tipped some in red.  It’s always good to have a beast that can shred.

The end product was still a bit light for something that is reportedly timeless, worm-eaten and hoary, so I used the Distress Ink pads in Vintage Photo and Walnut Stain on the edges and across the page.  Doing this reactivated some of the Inktense and I lost a few tentacles, but I think that’s okay too.  One is bound to lose tentacles over time, right?