Development Pt 9

Night Gaunts

 The first image illustrates "Out of what crypt they crawl I cannot tell" with the gaunt emerging from a crypt - however, I felt there was a lack of context and surrounding landscape in the image so I later created the surrounding area. Originally the idea was to fade the vignettes out however it seemed too much like they were floating in nowhere, so on the page layout designs I decided on making a circle border.

 I created the thumbnails for each individual piece separately before creating the actual drafts themselves - here are thumbnails for the second draft and page layout ideas.

Pictured here are the drafts for the second and third piece - for the second, I felt that the colour scheme was a little too natural and flat. I tried dark brown with a more mahogany colour however it gave the effect of sunset rather than night, the dark brown coupled with moss green created a much more appropriate effect. I wanted to depict the burning sun setting somewhere off in the distance, out of view, so an orange colour almost bordering the sky was decided upon in the colour experimentation beside it. Most of the third image lies on the grey filter I placed over it in coloured pencil - I felt I'd also dull the vibrancy down in photoshop, however the teal sky was something of which I really liked the strange and unnerving effect, so it was one I decided to delve into, including elements of green in the sky to throw viewers off. For the subject, I based the monster on bugs - particularly maggots, as they are associated with rot, death, and are very easy to create grotesque imagery with.

I tried to create thumbnails for the next illustration alongside creating quick pencil sketches of mountain silhouettes - another first for me that I was more unsure with when it came to drawing. I struggled finding the right imagery for this illustration, so moved onto the next one rather than waste time.

The development of a monster known as a 'shoggoth'. This monster is described elsewhere in the book to have more of a blob form however I'd seen the same kind of monster reappear again and again when looking up the character - I decided to translate this into the 'mane' that I gave it, using the seaweed together to form an unsure structure whilst the rest of its body is very well defined. I came up with the idea for this character in earlier development.

I wanted to include the 'jagged peaks of Thok' in this image, I wanted to almost seclude it into an entirely different world (the journey's destination) but also make it known that the rest of the world is just out of reach - I did this by again colouring the sky a strange colour, with the blue peeking through beyond the mountains as a promise of the world the protagonist has just been dragged to. I also looked at different colours I could use for the water but found a murky green was best.

For the final illustration, I wanted the Night Gaunt's face (or facelessness rather) on full display - I wanted to hide the facelessness until the very end, as it isn't mentioned until the last line of the poem. I really wanted to convey the whole "nightmare" element of the tale, ending it where it had most likely began - a bedroom, and a bed. After a look at several different colours I could use (blue for isolation, red as a colour of danger), I settled with a more green theme - a dark but pale green to suggest unwellness. 

Following this, I looked back at the other illustration I had previously skipped and took a liking to one of my thumbnails after all. The biggest change I made was to, again, distort the colours of the sky - as a recurring theme in this (one which links up to the Cats of Ulthar illustration too) to pursue the feeling of unease, but overall I was happy and created the template circle for tracing to ensure all finals were roughly the same size (this made for easier resizing).