Old Gods True form and Human form

Originally I planned to have two sets of 5 pictures.
one set of 5 would be the human ish forms of each old god in their time period.

and the other set was the horrific true form of said old god. sadly i didnt have time to get to complete the true form set though i have a rough example of what it would have looked like

 this would have been with each image created, and evidence of such ideas are evident on each mood board apart from Yog Sothoth as he was later thought out to just be in True form state.

Shub Niggurath would have had a beastly goat head with 9 eyes and black claws for hands

Nyarlethotep would have had a tentacle head and black sodden ooze around him

Cthulhu would have had a more sinister squid face, and teeth replacing what face he had taken in human form much like in one of the sketches

Azathoth would have been a sinister cloud of gass with a disgusting lumpy ooze benith it, with maybe a wig all sodden

for the show i'd like to get these done and have a slow slideshow with them phazing in and out to disturb audiences

Cthulhu revised image

after the persective pictures i wanted to go through another route and after looking up some other pictures of cthulhu i found a few that i felt inspired by, mostly tshirt designs and graphic illustrations.

so i took the sketches i had done earlier in the month and picked my favourite depiction which was the middle one with the horizontal eyes

 I then started to block out the colours, painting over the the top of the sketch in different shades to show the density of the bust, working my way down to almost black with his suit.

 finding a google image of a cameo brooch i picked out the one i thought represented best with the curls and scrolls, also the nice accent at the top and bottom.

using the circle select tool i carved away at making the cameo

 separating it into parts as i went along

 desaturated his nose as it stuck out too much
added in spooky friendly skull types around the boarder
added the summoning sigil at the top commonly found on the necronomicon
the dots at the top under the boarder are there to make sure everything is aligned

I was unsure wether to have light eyes are black eyes, making comparing screenshots, i sent them out to a few friends, who agreed the darker eyes looked best

Here i noticed that the front two tentacles were weirdly shaped, so i added definition to the start of them as lumps, and screen shot them both to compare and sent them off again to friends for inspection

The bumps above the face tendrils the bottom sets proved a better success then the flat edge in the top sets.
also adding little wings used up some of the space within the cameo background which i personally thought went well with the whole look of the piece.

Finally having found a good balance with the cameo and cthulhu himself i moved onto looking at colour combos to help separate the two  yet still have the harmony.

• I started with the top left, working with a dull toned yellow to green to brown pallet, and for the cameo, a beige to pink to purple dusky pallet.
• they really worked well and gave off an eerie tone, nothing too dark and nothing too bright, it really brought the whole design together.
• then i shifted the hues left to right +100 and -100 to get the blue version and red version, both were met with positive opinions but the first example was still by far the most liked.
• then i decided to saturate it to bring out the colours more, which worked beautifully, but for the subject, its too much
• and lighten it, which gave out a cute but creepy pastel pallet

all of these including the greyscale version are suitable for tshirt designs, bringing together different colours suited for different people

i especially love the gradient detailing to the skulls at the side and the abundance of eyes, not to mention you dont seem to notice the fact that there is the face of HP lovecraft hidden there.

the reason why i have watermarked everything i deemed possible to steal is becuase i dont want people ripping my images from the internet and using them to make any sort of profit, as i rather quite like this design and ive worked hard for it.

Here is my final render of the image, done in a vectored style perfect for posters, prints, T-shirts and other popular media

Shub Niggurath - from sketch to completion

I started off with blocking out the body and the hands, referencing these two pictures:

Sadly i forgot to take progress shots of the face, hair and horns... also the painting of the gown

but i referenced the lighting and colours from one of the pictures from my mood board

I was painting directly onto one layer, simply using the colourpicker to add gradient to the high lights and shadows

gave her a pallor caucasian skintone from this chart

I decided to give her a fur shawls to simulate the fact she lives in the forest. 

here ive also got the blocked out hands on display and the model i very very loosely based her face off of on the left 

the reason for her dark eyes with a golden flare was to signal she wasnt in the slightest human, giving a demony baphomet vibe to her.

here ive coloured in the horns which i picked form the mood board, the goat heads ive found had that eerie green which was perfect fit, contrasting against the red, i did do a hue change on them and though the blue suited the head, overall the green complimented the piece.

also added in the shading for the hands, the light source being on the left baring down

here ive changed the skintone to be more washed out to further show how ethereal and strange she is, really works well with the hair ive given her, before it was brown but the blue brought out the other base colours of red green and yellow and it blended a little in with her hair which i didnt want.

Here I started on the rope accents on her front which hold her pinny up and the rope around her hips

and adding more weight to the shawl and a back to it, along with an unidentifiable limb to further  show its from some animal

I wanted to add some unity to the painting by painting the face and eventually the hands.

here is a before and after picture i was contemplating, extending the nose to be more goat like and strange, thinning the eyebrows to add more focus to the eyes and moving the lips lower and reducing their size, as i found the lips before to look very fishlike from a far distance.

Further realisation that the face proportions were too stretched, i moved things around and gave her more of a forhead and shorter nose, not to mention bigger eyes and it evened out the face alot better. 

i also gave her eyes more of a glow to really make em pop

Finally i painted over her hands in a habberdash way and positioned her left hand over her ear to give her a purpose, like shes listening out for people in her forest.

along with her painted hands i gave her claw like fingernails to add a little bit of sinister to the fair faced goatlady.

also coloured her horns so they didnt look so ugly, i played around once again with the colors but the moss green still stayed the best in my opinion.

also adding blush to her cheeks, ear and hands by referancing my own hand and a friends ear.

I will add a background at a later stage ready for printing. 

also hopefully an OLD GOD feature where her face is a chilling many eyed goat demon

Shub Niggurath research

Shub-Niggurath

“Iä! Shub-Niggurath!” (“The Last Test,” “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Mound,” “Medusa’s Coil,” “The Horror in the Museum,” “The Thing on the Doorstep,” and “The Diary of Alonzo Typer”)

“One squat, black temple of Tsathoggua was encountered, but it had been turned into a shrine of Shub-Niggurath, the All-Mother and wife of the the Not-to-Be-Named-One. This deity was a kind of sophisticated Astarte, and her worship struck the pious Catholic as supremely obnoxious.” (“The Mound”)

“Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!” (“The Whisperer in Darkness,” “The Dreams in the Witch House,” “The Man of Stone”

http://www.hplovecraft.com/creation/bestiary.aspx#shub-niggurath

i will be drawing and personally one of the more interesting ones, i chose to have her in my project becuase she is one of the only gender defined female old gods that ive found in my research.

I read through some extracts of the things that HP lovecraft had written about the black goat and pulled some buzzwords and keywords i thought i could use in depicting her

• SHUB NIGGURATH -

• black goat of the woods 
• mass of muscle 
• moth 
• catholic 
• sophisticated 
• fertility goddess 
• copper temple 
• thousand young 
• snake mate 
• friendly towards the muses of man?? 
• evil cloud like 
• sayter - pan - satan 
• sons Nug + Yeb 
• Mate - Yig

only female eldar god ive researched. dont know where to put her right now. could be medieval? scottish? irish? germanic? viking?

those were my notes on her to mould out an idea.


already i have an idea about european anglo germanic themes and i had a picture in mind when i was reading up about her

I love the vibrent reds and the fur, plus the variety of trinkets she has.

going off that image i searched pagan women, germanic women celtic women and nothing came up that grabbed my attention

i searched viking women and this as the exact style i was looking for, grabbing photos from google, then searching the name shub niggurath i made a nice visual mood board to work off

Work before this project.

The reason why I'm doing this one project rather then the 'project a week' idea i had in the first place is becuase after a tutorial with my tutors one suggested that i could do one game idea and focus my efforts on that.

it got me thinking, and i felt lost and spread too thin with the week long projects, not to mention rushed, and my tutors tugging me in different directions, to focus on anatomy and perspective, and work on backgrounds, and work on poses and expressions. it was all a bit too much.

GO HERE FOR MY PREVIOUS FINAL BOSS BLOG
GO HERE FOR MY PREVIOUS FINAL BOSS BLOG
GO HERE FOR MY PREVIOUS FINAL BOSS BLOG

with this project i could get down a base idea that i had some love for and get creative.

i chose hp lovecraft mythos becuase its an interesting concept in the first place, and lovecraft described the horrors in such a vague way, it culd be interpreted different by anyone, thus giving me some le-way with designing characters.

Nyarlathotep from sketch to completion

With the modern look in mind i took elements from my mood board to start things rolling, though i did have a first idea to base him around turkish travellers and dancers like this fella and the clothed figure i found whilst researching nyarlathotep

But he's not any where near egypt nor what i wanted from the design.
heres the sketch i had roughly done based on the clothed figure

I was going for a soft yet arrogant look for him, something that will draw you into him before turning to insane or possibly just killing you

began fleshing out the body, giving him a suave cocky pose

I played aroun with the position of his head angle, sent it to a couple of friends for their opinion, and it was a resounding looking to the left, as it was anatomically correct to counter balance the hips

     

then onto inking him. i wanted to colour this piece with cell shading similar to a comic book style or online comics, as it is a pretty popular nowadays as its relatively easy to render once you've found a light source.

I lost alot of the facial emotion (as you can see below), as it often happens with inking a piece, it was a rough ink, as i wanted to keep my motions as much as possible, and try not to make it look so static

between the lines above and lines below, ive increased the hand size and lowered the belt and bellybutton to increase the size of his torso, as the suit pants are high waisted, it looks strange without the full attire

currently working on the colours to give him. working with blues, turquoises, golds and browns

Marking the colours down I added a Multiplier layer with a red and blocked in shadows and erased them till i got to a good balance, and did the same with an Overlay layer with a light yellow

then i added a mask for the hands, shawl and legs, darkening and lightening the bottom, it really made the image stand out with the block cell shaded colours

Overlaying a papyrus texture, because whats more Egypt then papyrus? added shadow on the floor for grounding him so he isnt going to float off into eternal space, and putting a glowing orb around his hand so signify that yes indeed he is dangerous and quite magical

I wasnt so sure of him at first, disliking how much of his expression and general feel left after i inked him, but slapping some colour on there really pulled him into life.. or.. unlife... or eternal life.

however you want to call it, im very happy with him.