Marie WheelerI’m not going to lie, I am vaguely daunted by the concept of the Night Gaunt and am thinking of doing something radically different medium-wise to convey these creatures.
Like many of Lovecraft’s creations, these appear only twice in his works, first in his poem, ‘Night Gaunts’, and then more notably in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath:
“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.”
Reportedly, these are creatures from Lovecraft’s childhood nightmares. Sounds terrifying. And what’s with the tickling? Bizarre.
Since I’m going to be taken with work throughout the day and the art is literally the last thing I will do in my day and in this post, I’m sharing the thought process and we can all see together what happens at the end!
So it’s the smooth, oily, whale-like surfaces that make me think I want to use either plain India Ink or black acrylic paint for the body of the night gaunt. It needs to be deep.
I will start with the background of a city-scape and paint the night gaunt over top. Maybe like a gargoyle. They remind me of gargoyles.
So that’s where it ended up. I do like some aspects of this, but there is a lot of work to do on my watercolor skills! I’ll keep saying it, real watercolor certainly lays down differently than those Inktense pencils. So much harder to control!
I’m kinda stoked about the sky though. That’s some progress.
