Development Pt 10

Cats of Ulthar

It was around this time I started to come closer to my deadline, so it was made evident to me that I didn't have enough time to illustrate all of the points in the story that I would have liked to, so I chose two points to illustrate. I had intended to draw Menes' chant into the sky, but one of my classmates had already illustrated this point and there are not many different ways to depict this scene - I wanted to keep as far from what my classmates were doing so I illustrated two of the final points in the story. The first point I drew was in which the cats take place in their ritual outside the old cottage - the sky is again very important in this shot, the vast array of colours with the brightest on the horizon drawing to the house as the focal point. Earlier in the story, Menes summoned people with animal heads into the clouds - one of my clouds is the silhouette of a man with a ram's head. I wanted the cat most in focus (in the very foreground) to be a black cat, symbolically representing bad luck or ill omens. I had looked into making the cats different breeds, odd species, to ensure the feeling of unease - however I found it more effective with everyday run-of-the-mill cats as it makes it more applicable to real life. This was originally intended to be a draft however, I was very satisfied with the outcome, and so decided to make any of the very small changes that it needed on photoshop rather than creating a whole separate illustration to fix minuscule issues.

First images in my mind for this piece were to actually illustrate a full skeleton - however, noting by this point just how much I would have to scale the images down, I realised that most of the detail will have disappeared by then and it would have been a waste of time so I settled for drawing a few bones picked clean by beetles. Another intention was to actually include Menes' kitten somewhere in this image, but the same point of losing detail stood for this as proportionally, the kitten would have had to have been much smaller. The skull on the wall is what I left in place of the kitten however, marking the brand on the wall of the skull of a cat, leaving clues on the furniture as well. The beetles from this part of the story have also made their feature (very subtly) in one of my Night Gaunts illustrations, as I really wanted to show that these two stories take place in the same world. Again, any changes I wanted to make were very small, so I stuck to retouching it in photoshop and keeping this image as my final piece.