Marie WheelerTsathoggua is one of the Old Ones, and though he wasn’t a creation of H.P. Lovecraft, he was first seen in print in one of Lovecraft’s stories, The Whisperer in the Darkness, with a nod to the creator, Clark Ashton Smith:
Tsathoggua is an “amorphous, toad-like god-creature mentioned in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon and the Commoriom myth-cycle preserved by the Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton”
The physical descriptions of this Old One differ greatly between the two writers, so naturally, I went with the HPL description to honor to the Necronomicon theme.
Drawing Tsathoggua
I did something very different today though, and while I’m not sure I made a good decision in terms of consistency for the art journal, I do feel it looks pretty awesome. I have always thought that the Necronomicon Art Journal might look awesome if it had a style that appeared as though a medieval monk had transcribed it.
Inspiration for this one comes from YouTuber Gay Traeger. Her four-part series on Watercolor Sketching is pretty awesome and in this fourth in the series, she discusses the journaling part. I quite liked the look of her work and decided that I would try to mimic that in the art journal.
I started by using a Koh-I-Noor 2H pencil to sketch out the basics of the scene and then used my Micron pens to outline the major features and add some gross shading and texture.
A lot of art journal people seem to use a sketched in box to help frame the subject of the journal page and Gay Traeger identified the same, but with bits of the subject busting out of the frame for interest. She also talked about balance between the box for the date at the bottom and the box around the first letter of the title.
After I finished the shading, texture pieces, I used my Sennelier watercolors and a Koi waterbrush to put in the coloration for the sketch. I continued the idea of balance with the boxes.
That’s all for this week. I really love the overall design of this, though I do see some things I would like to change for future attempts in this style.
As always, thank you for sharing in this journey with me and if you decide to buy any of the materials used today, please use my Amazon Affiliate link 🙂
