New at Propnomicon, photos of a Giant Cthulhu Idol being installed in a gallery.
Propnomicon’s PropCthulhu
18 Tuesday Dec 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Category Archives: Lovecraftian arts
Ulthar Post for Christmas
17 Monday Dec 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
My Patreon patrons will find there are now two new blog posts from me with a printable-size ‘Ulthar Post’ stamp. I realised that one can treat Patreon like a private patrons-only blog, so now that I know how to do it there will be more such posts.
It might look good on Christmas parcels, as well as hand-delivered Christmas cards.
The edge-deckling is in the cutout .PNG, but you might find it’s a bit tricky to add that by hand. Especially if you print it on paper at less than about four inches. Serrated shears of the sort used for fabrics are going to be too large, but careful use of a sharp X-Acto (USA) or Stanley (UK) knife to form deckling might do it. As it’s a PNG with a transparent edge it might also be used as a template for a very thin bit of 3D-printing — you might get an amusing beer-mat or fridge-magnet out of it.
Putting a simple drop-shadow on it before you print, and then printing on paper the same white colour as the envelope should also reveal the deckling.
You could of course get some real but large stamps of low value, and carefully stick the Lovecraft square over the top.
Prints set: Enrique Breccia
17 Monday Dec 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Issued in 2016, a set of Lovecraft illustrations by the artist Enrique Breccia. A3-sized.
Starmont 1982
17 Monday Dec 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Another nice bit of cover art I’d not seen before. The cover for S.T. Joshi’s 1982 Starmont Guide to Lovecraft.
New book: I Luoghi di Lovecraft
16 Sunday Dec 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Pre-ordering now, in Italian, the 240-page I Luoghi di Lovecraft (The Places of Lovecraft). A ‘guide to Lovecraft country for new tourists’, apparently written to conform to the style-sheet given to authors of the Lonely Planet guidebook series.
Cephalopods of the Multiverse
15 Saturday Dec 2018
Posted in Censorship, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
As the new Aquaman movie apparently romps to worldwide success, the oceanic tentacular becomes even more alluring. What better time for a comprehensive survey of the tentacular aspects of the popular game Magic the Gathering. It’s newly published in the Journal of Geek Studies as “Cephalopods of the Multiverse” by Mark A. Carnall, curator at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
On Aquaman, I’ve not seen it yet but it apparently throws DC’s usual preachy ‘grimness and angst’ overboard, in favour of a well-made fun adventure with epic CG sets and lively CG sea-monsters with Lovecraftian tendencies. And let’s face it, that’s really all we want from most superhero movies. It’s been lightly censored for gore, in UK cinemas, so as to get a 12A rating.
Colin Wilson News
13 Thursday Dec 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works
It appears that scholars and publishers are doing serious work on republishing and writing about Colin Wilson, the British fringe philosopher and novelist (The Space Vampires etc) who played a part in the reception of H.P. Lovecraft. See Colin Wilson World News for full details. Regrettably the site has no RSS feed that I can find.
MN90: Wandrei
12 Wednesday Dec 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
MN90 does tiny blipticles on Minnesota history, spoken audio micro-articles in 90 seconds as downloadable MP3 files, with music and FX. One of their latest is “Pen Pals with H.P. Lovecraft”…
In 1926, Donald Wandrei was a 19-year-old university student when he decided to write a fan letter to H.P. Lovecraft. Britt Aamodt has an account of Wandrei’s summer hitchhike trip to visit the horror writer and how that friendship led Wandrei, years later, to found Arkham House to publish and preserve Lovecraft’s fiction.”
I like the idea, but they probably need to get MN90’s uploaded to YouTube as videos with static pictures. Then people can easily make and share their own playlist compilations of the episodes. 90 seconds seems too short, judging by this Wandrei release. I’d say 3 minutes would be a better format.
Incidentally I’m pleased to see the Hevelin Fanzine Collection appears to have switched from tiling their fanzine page-images, switching over to big static single page scans. Tiling is no protection for big public domain images, as there’s a fairly easy capture/re-assembly workflow. But my guess would be that the apparent changes at Hevelin’s transcription portal are to accommodate transcribers who want to download and OCR. OCR can increasingly be machine-learning trained to work with awkward things such as hand-lettered comic books and also, one assumes, the stencil-punched and ink-leaked words on old Gestetner duplicated fanzine pages. But the change also has the effect of making it easier to extract, clean and fix fannish artwork… such as this from Virgil Partch in The Acolyte for Winter 1945, depicting Donald Wandrei in uniform…
Picture: Virgil Partch sketch of Donald Wandrei in The Acolyte for Winter 1945. Newly extracted and cleaned.
The Secret of The Stone Frog
11 Tuesday Dec 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A Lovecraftian interlude in the children’s 80-page graphic novel The Secret of The Stone Frog, a book in which 7-9 year-old advanced or assisted readers get a very palatable and gentle lead-in to a later sampling of Spirited Away, Alice in Wonderland, and even H.P. Lovecraft (the end of “The Festival”)…
Secret of The Stone Frog was the debut hand-drawn book by David Nytra of Canada, in 2012. I liked the art and layouts but wasn’t overly keen on the main dialogue lettering, which often seemed too computerised for my taste. If you’re going to the trouble of hand-drawing everything, why spoil the effect with digital lettering? But I guess school library sales are important at this end of the publishing market, and librarians probably assume they need ‘lettering clarity’ for ease of reading by their less able patrons. Currently the book is only available in paper.
It would be a fine Christmas stocking filler for intelligent and imaginative 7-9 year olds. If the primary dialogue were to be re-lettered, the whole book colourised in a soft watercolour underlay, and a better cover added, then it would probably sell nicely as a Kindle ebook.
Nytra took the same characters on a similar but fantasy medieval-themed 120-page dreamlands outing in 2015, Windmill Dragons, but I haven’t seen that one.
Lovecraft 3D review
11 Tuesday Dec 2018
Posted in 3D, Lovecraftian arts
A preview of a new review of the “H.P. Lovecraft 3D” character from Meshbox, currently sold for $12.95 at their Miyre store with royalty-free commercial use for renders (in Poser 11).
My short-but-detailed technical test-review will appear in the next issue of the free monthly Digital Art Live magazine (December 2018, #35). Sign up to the mailing-list to be emailed a link to your free PDF copy, as soon as the issue is released.
Added to Open Lovecraft
10 Monday Dec 2018
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, New books, REH, Scholarly works
Added to Open Lovecraft…
* Philip Emery, “Revivifying the Ur-text: a reconstruction of sword-&-sorcery as a literary form”, PhD thesis at Loughborough University, UK, 2018. (The author is a North Staffordshire writer, of several horror novels. Here he asks if, given this literary genre’s relative neglect in recent decades, it is possible to identify the genre’s core characteristics and then use these “to create a work that realizes the form’s potential to exist as literature”. Explores the structural development of the Ur-genre as it emerged in the stories of R.E. Howard (influenced by Lovecraft in terms of the horror elements), then surveys de Camp’s later contributions and distortions, and generally seeks to identify the “pristine elements” at the core of the genre’s once-flourishing form which are still available to creative writers).
On Abe this week
10 Monday Dec 2018
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings
New on AbeBooks this week…
* W. Paul Cook, H. P. Lovecraft: A Portrait. With an essay on Cook himself.
* Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., H. P. Lovecraft: His Life, His Work. With Chronology of the Life, as known in the late 1970s.
* An Archive of Mailings from the ‘Necronomicon”, the Howard Phillips Lovecraft Amateur Press Association.
* “At the Mountains of Madness” in Astounding Stories, February-April 1936.
