I think I’m done, or rather Cthulhu is done. Its taken about 3 months to get from start to baking point on him and he has gone through a few redesigns along the way.
For one brief period he had ears but they looked stupid so they went. The shape of the ridge around the head also got changed and I wanted a more bulbous look at the bottom of the back of his skull. The final big part was adding the wings which had been giving me the fear due to the size of the back but in the end I found them pretty easy to do. Once the wings got added it was just a case of adding the final details such as text on the base, some wrinkles, the ridges along the tentacles around the face, cleaning up the claws on the feet, filling deep holes that would be hard to cast plus a few other folds here and there.
The text on the base comes from the Enochian alphabet which was suggested by Tomas Rawlings who pointed out that John Dee has done one of the translations of the Necronomicon. Using Dee’s script as the basis, I translated… something… I’m not saying what but any fans of Lovecraft would be able to figure it out quickly. I created the lettering by printing off the text and then gently sticking the paper to the sides. While it was held in place I punched through the paper with a scalpel to get the basic shape, then once the paper was off I cleaned up the mess.
The final result looks good and I’ve a few thoughts on this text. Firstly that Dee was alive from 1527 to around 1608 meaning either the statue if from that era and Dee would have overseen the statues creation, or that the Enochian alphabet is genuine and the statue dates from a much earlier period. Would Dee have really wanted to commission such a blasphemous item? Unlikely as he seemed to collect more than he had created so I prefer to think the item predates him. The problem with that is the Enochian alphabet was given to him by an Angel. Are Angels in the habit of carving statues of beings of unspeakable evil? Who knows, but it adds a little mystery to the item. Secondly, the text at the back is a bit lower than at the sides or the front. This is annoying me no end but because of the way I finished the wings, I can’t really move the text up and it looked stupid on either side. I will have to live with it for now.
The next step is the cleaning up once he’s baked. Spraying, cleaning, spraying…. Plus maybe getting some latex for the casting at the weekend.