Category Archives: Cthulhu

Further adventures in sculpting

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I’ve started slapping some bits of sculpey around in the last few evenings so thought I would chronicle my adventures in the creation of my little ‘thulhu.

First up was a night of cranking the sculpey. As this stuff is more than 10 years old its gone a little hard around the edges, fortunately its been kept in an airtight box in my nice dark, cool cellar so its still usable. I’ve heard tales of the stuff being delivered where its like slime, dripping with oils and viscous matter but I’ve only ever seen it ‘soft’, ‘slightly hard’ and ‘don’t drop that on your foot if you want to keep your toes’. In the process of cranking it through I managed to break the gears for the widest setting on the pasta maker so I was reduced down to no3. Fortunately this seems to work pretty well as it pulps the sculpey up well.


Snigger now and get it over with… All done? Good. The armature beneath that item is the top of an old jelly bean dispenser with a rod of metal inserted firmly into the top. It stands around 7″ from base to tip and is nice and firm so there won’t be any sagging. (Impressed I managed to get through all of that without saying erect?)


A couple of hours work gets me to this point where I am starting to block out the basic shape, there is a head, basic position of the legs and bulking out the body. I’m working off a few reference images, mainly a Bob Eggleton painting of squidhead, but i’m trying to get this one to be something that has come out of me rather than someone elses design. I’m basing the design on Lovecrafts description of the statue from the story “Call of Cthulhu” and there are hundreds of other peoples interpretations and they all follow the same basis. Squatting tentacled horror, hands on knees, cryptic runes/text around the base… Fairly normal for your everyday run of the mill ancient slumbering evil god.


While working on the shape I jabbed myself on one of my tools and managed to get blood all over the place. Funny thing is it was only a tiny stab wound but the blood wouldn’t stop, probably because the tool was quite sharp and this morning it was really tingly.


Days cycled to work: 48
Days tramped along in snow and ice: 2
Days driven: 0

Happy St Davids day

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Feck me i’m somewhat thrown there. I installed a plugin which managed to crash the site, fortunately everything seems ok now after I ripped the offending plugin out via FTP. What I was trying to do was post up a picture of the three books I got today via Amazon but arrived on World Book day and St Davids. Sadly none of them are Welsh but they are books so one out of two isn’t bad.

The first book is The ballard of Rango. Yeah i’m bandwagoning here but it was such a good film. The book is a nice big chunky hardback with stunning photos of the design work and i’m pleased to see some photos of actual sculptures in the design process.

Book two was described as Mecha porn and its not far off the truth. Abakan 2288 is page after page of sketches, paintings, sculpting, kit bashing and general robotic love. There are some nice designs in there and even though I’m not big on mecha (it all tends to blend into one after a while) this is an interesting enough book to get me over the ‘giant robot’ness of it.

Last up was a copy of The Arcanum. This sounds like a serious mashup of Necronauts and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it features Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, H. P. Lovecraft, and Marie Laveau as a team of investigators who erm… investigate. Look, i’ve only just got it ok? I can’t say what its like because i’ve not read it. I’ll let you know.

While on the subject of Lovecraft, I downloaded Call of Cthulhu: Wasted Land the other week. Its a turn based, squad controlling, horror infested RPG based on the RPG by Chaosium which is based around the Cthulhu Mythos by HP Lovecraft. I’m only a few levels in as its quite tricky to play for long times at the moment but its great fun with loads of nice touches which really help set the mood of a WW1 infested with horrors ripped from the pages of the Lovecrafts work. As I’ve been a fan for years its nice to see that this has been put together by people with a love of the subject matter and not just by people who are cashing in on a popular subject.

In all my attempts to understand the bizarre nature of zbrush, I’ve never really managed to stick to it. Tonight I’ve had something of a turning point which seems to have come about from drinking and banging my fist against my wacom.
While pig ugly, this represents by first solid breakthrough in both detailing an object imported from c4d and adding some form of colour to it. While the frogbear was a step in this direction that was over the course of several weeks and was years ago. All that knowledge has seeped from my mind like a bit of rotten fruit from a broken fridge.

Days cycled to work: 42
Days walked to work through snow and ice: 2
Days driven: 0

me old china

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Gardening at the daughters school today and after a good few hours moving compost, digging ground, carrying gravel and generally acting like a hybrid of Alan Titchmarsh and Charlie Dimmock (i didn’t have my bra on either) i was knackered. Settling down in my own garden for a quiet read didn’t happen as it was too cold when not sweating over a hot shovel but i did manage to get the telescope out and calibrate the targeting thingy on it.

After that I managed to read for a bit and I have to say that “Kraken” by China Mieville is one of the best books i’ve read in a while. Yes it really is a kraken read* and theres a Cthulhu reference in there! It looks like its not wrapped up in the Cthulhu mythos, which is probably a good thing really as it would have been a cheap gimmick, but rather it gets referenced by one of the characters. My gibbous moon is satisfied. Anyway, i can heartily recommend it to anyone who likes things like Hellblazer (the comics not the films) as its got that kind of feeling running through it. I’m looking forward to finishing it.

*bad joke provided by the other half.