art by me 2024
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Going to see Jeffrey Combs at the end of June and decided to make some art because MY GOD I AM EXCITED <3
I may turn these into little 11 x 17 posters if enough people are interested because I love how it turned out.
*Aella sits at the edge of a dock after sunset, enjoying the peacefulness of the sea as she hums My Jolly Sailor Bold while threading seashells and seaglass into a necklace, her feet idly swishing through the water as she gently moves her legs to the tune.*
(- @the-syren-queen )
*Lovecraft just emerges from the water, lifting himself onto the dock seemingly with no effort, he’s also weirdly.. not dripping water for having just came out of the sea.*
Queerness is less like Dracula, where the monsters turn you into one of them, and more like The Shadow Over Innsmouth, where you realize you were one of them all along
My take on some of the Lovecraftian deities. Will probably do more of these.
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Open for commissions, 50$ for a finished drawing in my style, 10$ for a quick design sketch.
My Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/nashotobi
Check out my Lovecraftian illustrated book Welcome to Shipsgrave https://www.tumblr.com/nashotobi/720752861149003776/you-can-purchase-a-digital-copy-of-my-book-welcome?source=share
I read Fat Face by Michael Shea last month and it was. Fine? It was a Cthulhu Mythos story written in the 80s, it was very edgy and it had a lot of tropes I’m not a fan of, I don’t really recommend it, but I have to talk about one detail I have not stopped thinking about since I read it.
So. I knew Fat Face through reputation because it was the story that inspired Shoggoth Lords from the Call of Cthulhu TTRPG, shoggoths that can control their cellular makeup to look like humans. And the twist in Fat Face is that shoggoths have been hiding amongst humans in Los Angeles, and at the end of the story one of them eats the protagonist.
The tone of the story is grit. It’s grime. It’s sleaze and sexual violence and drug abuse on top of cosmic horror. It wants to be taken seriously so bad.
But here’s the thing about the shoggoths: they have a business.
They have two businesses they run out of an office building in downtown Los Angeles. A shoggoth is a primordial blob of eyes and mouths and flesh and hunger, and the idea of one of them at the LA Office of Finance registering an LLC is already. Great. Perfect. No notes.
The business is a front — and again, that’s great, a shoggoth went, “I want to do some nefarious deeds and not get caught by humans; I know, I’ll register a fake business that’ll be a front, and no human will ever suspect” — because the actual interior of this office is a room of pools of water made from black and ancient Antarctic rocks so that shoggoths can relax in their original blobby forms and eat stray animals that they’ve caught.
So it’s basically just. A place for shoggoths to unwind after a long day of pretending to be human. It’s portrayed as cosmic horror, but it’s shoggoth Cheers. Sometimes you wanna go where nobody knows your shape.
Here’s the kicker. The front of the business is a hydrotherapy clinic and stray pet rescue.
When they decided to make a front for their secret lair in an LA office building where they hang out in pools of water and eat stray animals — the front they prominently display and advertise — they decided to go with a hydrotherapy clinic and stray pet rescue.
That is Goosebumps shit. The rest of the story reads like a tone poem about the sleaze and violence of Los Angeles, and the main twist of the story reads like R.L. Stine.
But that’s not even the detail I can’t stop thinking about. Because the story reveals that this business — which again, is a front made by alien blobs to eat stray animals like an ALF-themed buffet and hang out in jacuzzi tubs of Antarctic rocks in an LA office — has a flyer.
Which means there’s a shoggoth with a passion for graphic design