My new finished portrait. Click on the image for the full-size 1090 x 1200px image. Many thanks to the Powerhouse Museum (man’s torso) and Tracey Olson (mist-tentacles) for the Creative Commons elements.

Now on at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia in the USA, Creatures of the Abyss (to 6th September 2010). It sounds rather kiddy-oriented and thus likely to be over-run by little monsters and their mothers, but it’s said to have…

“Full-scale models, preserved specimens, exploration vehicles, and a bioluminescence theater”.

… and there are some (presumably) kid-free evening openings.

It’s accompanied at the same venue by the exhibition A Many-Colored Glass: Ethereal Images of Microscopic Marine Life — the catalogue for which is available via print-on-demand at Blurb.

An illustration for At the Mountains of Madness? No, it’s a scientific photomicrograph of some ascorbic acid and liquid crystalline xanthin gum. (Not part of the exhibition).

If you’re in London, England, then the Natural History Museum has the similar major summer exhibition The Deep (to 5th September 2010). Review with photos

Grognardia delves into the prehistory of the Cthulhu tabletop RPG game…

“Sandy Petersen and Lynn Willis’s roleplaying masterpiece, Call of Cthulhu, was in fact the second Lovecraftian RPG Chaosium attempted but the first one to be completed and actually published.”

Rick Sardinha added to the Selected Artists links category…

His works were produced for “An Exhibition of Unspeakable Things” (illustrations of Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book), an exhibition at Maison d’Ailleurs gallery which ran from 28th October 2007 to 6th April 2008.

It seems there’s a big Italian project, which has just rolled out to the launchpad, to do a complete illustrations/comics adaptation of all the stories of Lovecraft. It seems the project already has a good forty-plus Italian artists strapped in and paired up with their stories.

Stunningly Lovecraftian glass negative scan of a circa-1911 picture, from Will Ceau…

Original autochrome (photocrom) postcards from the public-domain archives:

[ Hat-tips: io9 and the Library of Congress ]

Thanks to Jurvetson for the Creative Commons shell picture.

Lovecraftians might enjoy this one. A fictional “dew mine” in Sussex, England — rendered in a mix of 3D photorealistic rendered ‘photography’, maps, plans and sketches. Looks like an interesting place to set a new story…

A week ago I wrote of S.T. Joshi’s monumental Lovecraft biography I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft…

“Hopefully this new book won’t continue the tradition of dreadful cover-art, something that seems to plague Lovecraft books.”

Now, news of the jacket design, courtesy of W.H. Pugmire on the SFF Forum…

“S.T. shew’d me the jackets and they are wonderful. Each has the Shunned House on Benefit Street in the background. The photo of young HPL on Volume One is the same that Ellen used for Lovecraft Unbound, and then for [ Volume ] II there is an older HPL in a photo that is S. T.’s favourite image of the author. […] official release later this month.”

I must say that I’ve plundered my PayPal account to buy a copy (there go the profits on selling my self-published books for the last six months…) and am greatly looking forward to being able to start reading the two volumes. I’ve been able to read parts of the Life via Google Books, and they’re fascinating.