Shadow Over Innsmouth

Here's a picture I did inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's excellent and super-creepy horror novella Shadow Over Innsmouth, which has to do with a decaying New England fishing village and the cross-breeding bargain the citizens made long ago with a race of horrible fish-man creatures.  It's a great and terrifying story, and gets me all creeped out however many times I read it.  For some reason I was in a scary-stuff mood recently (usually that comes with the lead-up to Halloween, not in April), and I wanted to draw something in that vein, so here it is.  It's not actually depicting an event from the story, but was inspired by it:

(Click on image for full-sized version)

This is one of the most detailed and labor-intensive drawings I've ever done - it's 11x17, black and white ink over blue pencil.  It's also for sale.  Considering the hours put into it and how pleased I was with the final result, I'm asking $250, which includes shipping.

e-mail me if interested - chris at curiousoldlibrary dot com.

Couple of characters, those guys

A couple of cartoonist friends were visiting a couple of weeks ago, and I realized that I should snag their visages in order to design my comic-relief duo in the foreign legion book. Here are some sketches...

 ...and one actual drawing. Whether the design will tweak more before I actually hit pages, I can't say.

 The plot of the new book has been completely written out, and is fairly tight. I'll be revising it heavily over the next couple of weeks, in order to get it to where I can jump to pages as soon as the Winter Break begins. I still have to nail down a few character deigns, but I've got a good feeling overall. I also drew this fish-man. I read a few (my first) H.P. Lovecraft stories to get revved up for Thanksgiving, and I loved them, especially Call of Cthulhu and Shadow Over Insmouth, the latter of which prominently features some horrifying toadish fishmen. I've been sketching 'em like crazy ever since!