Marie WheelerThis week’s installment in the Necronomicon Art Journal is the crawling chaos of Nyarlathotep.
The best description come from the short story of the same name:
“And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences—of electricity and psychology—and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hours were rent with the screams of a nightmare.”
It would feel silly to just draw a plain old pharaoh, so I decided that I really needed to add tentacles to this creature 
to show the horror that lies beneath the regular clothes. But then I decided that more tentacles were necessary and made them come out of the eye and mouth holes. Since Nyarlathotep is also identified as the crawling chaos in The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath, it makes sense to have the writhing mass beneath the flesh.
Now that I sound completely unhinged, I will move forward with the art.
I used the basic watercolor paper and did a rough sketch with my pencil. I then added a black to blue to green watercolor wash in the hope of giving the picture a sense of distance. As you can see that worked to some extent, but they pyramids are floating in space, so there is clearly work to be done.
If I had to guess without A.D.’s help, I would say that it is a perspective issue. I have a lot of perspective issues, lol!
Either way, it is my work for now. I am currently listening to a video on YouTube as I work and the gentleman speaking, John Muir Laws, starts out his lecture by asking the audience who is the most prolific sketcher among them. An audience member speaks up shy and she states that she doesn’t think she does the most, but she draws every day. She has done this for two years. She is identified as the most prolific and he takes her sketchbook, showing it around the room. His statement is simple.
Art is a numbers game. The more you practice, the stronger the neural connections between what your eye sees and what your hand can draw. Simple.
If I keep practicing art every day, I will get better.
