RAT THING

RAT THING
"Witnesses said it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands. It took messages betwixt old Keziah and the devil, and was nursed on the witch's blood, which it sucked like a vampire."
H.P. Lovecraft, Dreams In the Witch-House

GYAA-YOTHN

GYAA-YOTHN

"As it is, he merely hinted at the shocking morbidity of these great floundering white things, with black fur on their backs, a rudimentary horn in the centre of their foreheads, and an unmistakable trace of human or anthropoid blood in their flat-nosed, bulging-lipped faces."

"The chief ground for such a supposition was the well-known fact that the vanished inhabitants of Yoth had been quadrupedal."

H.P. Lovecraft & Zealia Bishop, The Mound

GORGO

GORGO

"O friend and companion of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs and spilt blood, who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs, who longest for blood and bringest terror to mortals, Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look favourably on our sacrifices!"
H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror At Red Hook

"Gorgo may be a variation on Gorgon, the snake-haired female monster that could turn men to stone."
S.T. Joshi & Peter Cannon, More Annotated H.P. Lovecraft

"Reflection had given it charm, made it acceptable to sanity, just as reflection had made those snakes, and the one who wore them, picturesque and not petrifying. But no amount of reflection could have conceived seeing the thing itself, nor the state of being stone."
Thomas Ligotti, The Medusa

"And I should have seen still other of them that are gone before, whom I would fain have seen- Theseus and Pirithous glorious children of the gods, but so many thousands of ghosts came round me and uttered such appalling cries, that I was panic stricken lest Proserpine should send up from the house of Hades the head of that awful monster Gorgon."
Homer, The Odyssey

"They (Gorgons) were described as having the form of women but with wings on their backs, great tusks or fangs in huge gaping mouths from which their tongues lolled, heads full of writhing snakes in place of hair, and brazen clawed hands on their arms. Their most fearsome feature, however, was their eyes, for any mortal who was foolish enough to look at them was instantly turned to stone"

"Gorgon is also the name of a monster in the early mythology of Greece. It was said to be generated by Gaia as a creature that could assist the Gigantes in their struggle against the Olympian gods. It was dispatched by Athene, who decapitated the beast and placed it beneath the meeting place, or agora. The confusion of this early legend with the later classical myth involving the hero Perseus has let to the two being totally conflated and t he earlier version almost lost."
Carol Rose, Giants, Monsters and Dragons

MORMO

MORMO

"O friend and companion of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs and spilt blood, who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs, who longest for blood and bringest terror to mortals, Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look favourably on our sacrifices!"
H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror At Red Hook

"Infernal and earthly and heavenly Bombo, come. Goddess of waysides, of cross-roads, lightbearer, nightwalker. Hater of the light, lover and companion of the night, Who rejoicest in the baying of hounds and in purple blood; Who dost stalk among corpses and the tombs of the dead, Thirst for blood, who bringest fear to mortals, Gorgo and Mormo and Mene and many-formed one. Come thou propitious to our libations!"
Hippolytus Of Rome, Philosophumena or Refutation Of All Heresies

"The Mormo or Mormolyce, possibly meaning "Banewolf" or "Werewolf", was described as a monstrous female who had originally been deprived of her children. The grief had turned her into a monster that abducted and took the children of others in revenge."
Carol Rose, Giants, Monsters and Dragons

"Oh, what a trembling the Mormo brought us then, when we were little ones!--On its head were huge ears, and it walked on all fours, and changed from one face to another!"
Erinna, The Distaff

"The belief in Mormo and Gorgo is also occasionally found; and Gello, another child-eating monster of classical times"
Henry Fanshawe Tozer, Researches In the Highlands Of Turkey

Sketches 6

Here's another sketch set before next week's new posts. They're all Gods In Human Form from The Horror At Red Hook. I really enjoy doing these because they're a little different from H.P.L.'s usually tentacled monstrosities, but still within his loose mythos.
Here's my sketch of Hecate, the second set of arms, the knife, and the belladonna came along in the final version.
Aside from the necklace with the testicles almost everything from the sketch to the drawing is the same. The goat heads aren't from a specific text source but I saw them in a sculpture of the Magna Mater and couldn't resist.
The Moloch sketch was the simplest, missing the holes on the chest, the blood, the upheld arm, and the feet...and of course...his...ahem...ummmm

Anyway, get ready for two weeks worth of new stuff. There'll be a few more Gods In Human Form from The Horror At Red Hook, a couple redraws of old stuff and some really obscure creatures from H.P.L.'s collaborations with R. H. Barlow!

News...

Hey guys. This week I have a to work on a piece for an art benefit I'm organizing with Jeanne D'Angelo and Ryann Casey for Bat Conservation International. I'll post more information about it soon, but just a quick run down. 5.7 million bats have been killed by White Nose Syndrome in the Northeast United States in the last 5 years. This fungus grows on their faces while hibernating, causing them to wake up mid winter, expend precious energy reserves and essentially causing the them to starve to death. We've asked 50 artists from all over the world to make art inspired by bats, bat folklore, or bat mythology, and on April 20th we'll be having a show at Grindcore House in South Philadelphia. ALL proceeds will go to Bat Conservation International.

I've also been working on my dream project, which is collecting all these Yog-Blogsoth drawings in a book. I've been in very loose talks with a publisher, but since that may have turned into a slightly different project, I thought I'd start off with a series of zines. The first volume will be 10 full color 8.5"x 11" pages with hand printed covers. Each volume will have the same amount of pages and will continue until I'm done. I'll probably limit the run of each volume to about 25-50 depending on how much interest there is. Here are the first test pages (I've already tweaked these a lot since shooting this)

Laying this out has made me go through a lot of the older drawings, and not surprisingly, I'm pretty unhappy with a few of them. So, in the next few weeks you'll probably see a bunch of redrawings mixed in with new stuff on here. Some were minor detail changes and in those cases I won't make a new post (like the Incubus is a bit more...um....well endowed now), but for things like the Yithian, Rat Thing (Brown Jenkin), Star Spawn, and Y'm-Bhi, I'll make new posts for the new drawings. Also, as an aside, it'd be cool if you could comment if you'd be interested in one, just so I have an idea of how many I should make...

I also thought some of you might like to see where I've been getting a lot of my quotes and reference for some of these monsters. Jeanne and I have an extensive occult/mythology library that we've been working on for years. Here's a few pics.


These two shelves are what I use most for this blog. I kept the resolution pretty big so you can see the titles if you're interested. The ones I find the most useful (aside from H.P.L.'s stuff) are the Carol Rose books, Giants, Monsters and Dragons and, Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns, and Goblins. Both are presented as encyclopedias, with descriptions of appearance, and folkloric roots for each creature.
On top of all this I still have a bunch more mythos books that I don't have room for in the library (ie; works by Ramsey Campbell, Lin Carter, Stephen King, Richard Tierney, Brian Lumley as well as H.P.L.s predecessors Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, William Hope Hodgson). If you have any questions about any of these books just message me and I'll give you what info I have. Ok, I'll have another post of sketches this week and then next week there will be 5 more monsters popping up in your feed!

MICTLANTEUCTLI

MICTLANTEUCTLI

“Mictlanteuctli, Great Lord, a sign! A sign from within thy black cave! Iä! Tonatiuh-Metztli! Cthulhutl! Command, and I serve!”
H.P. Lovecraft, The Electric Executioner

"Mictlantecuhtli usually appears as a skeleton of bleached white bones with red, bloody spots. He is often festooned with owl feathers, paper head ornaments and banners, and wears a collar of extruded eyeballs."
Mary Miller & Karl Taube, An Illustrated Dictionary Of the Gods and Symbols Of Ancient Mexico and the Maya

"The underworld, a dangerous place known as Mictlan, is ruled by the devious skeletal god Mictlantecuhtli, Lord of Mictlan"
Karl Taube, Aztec and Maya Myths

MAGNA MATER

MAGNA MATER

"Satan here held his Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless childhood the leprous limbs of phosphorescent Lilith were laved. Incubi and succubae howled praise to Hecate, and headless moon-calves bleated to the Magna Mater."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror At Red Hook

"Artemis Of Ephesus, perhaps best known from the "many-breasted" statues that have been discovered at Ephesus, is principally the Earth Mother, than Anatolian Magna Mater, or Cybele the goddess of fertility or fructification."
 Geoffrey W. Bromiley, International Standard Bible Encyclopedia: A-D

"The Ephesus guidebooks say that these days most archaeologists don’t think the lumps on Artemis’ chest are really breasts, but rather the severed testicles of sacrificial bulls—fertility offerings that were part of her sacred rites. Historically, severed testicles were intimately associated with both Artemis and Anatolian Cybele; her priests cut off their genitals to honor her, and only a man thus unmanned could preside over her temple rites." 
Tim Ward, Savage Breast

LILITH

LILITH

"It was murder—strangulation—but one need not say that the claw-mark on Mrs. Suydam’s throat could not have come from her husband’s or any other human hand, or that upon the white wall there flickered for an instant in hateful red a legend which, later copied from memory, seems to have been nothing less than the fearsome Chaldee letters of the word “LILITH'".

"Somewhere dark sticky water was lapping at onyx piers, and once the shivery tinkle of raucous little bells pealed out to greet the insane titter of a naked phosphorescent thing which swam into sight, scrambled ashore, and climbed up to squat leeringly on a carved golden pedestal in the background."

"Satan here held his Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless childhood the leprous limbs of phosphorescent Lilith were laved."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror At Red Hook

"Lilith is a demoness with a human appearance except that she has wings."
The Talmud; B. Nidda 24b

"She bedecks herself with all kinds of jewelry
like an abhorrent prostitute posing on the corner to seduce men.
The fool who approaches her--
she grabs him and kisses him, [Prov. 7:13]
pours him wine from the dregs, from the venom of vipers.
As soon as he drinks, he strays after her.
Seeing him stray from the path of truth,
she strips herself of all her finery that she dangled before that fool,
her adornments for seducing men:
her hair all arranged, red as a rose,
her face white and red,
six trinkets dangling from her ears,
her bed covered with fabric from Egypt,
on her neck all the jewels of the East,
her mouth poised, a delicate opening,
what lovely trappings!"
Zohar Sitrei Torah 1:147b-148b; Jacob's Journey

"This text was used to interpret a sculpture of a woman with bird talons for feet as being a depiction of Lilith."
Lowell K. Handy, Lilith; Anchor Bible Dictionary

"The devouring hag Lilitu, here rendered in painted terra cotta, was among the most terrible spirits of Sumerian mythology and a model for the Hebrew demon Lilith. Winged and taloned, she searched fro men to seduce and children to murder."
Mysteries Of the Unknown-Witches and Witchcraft

"This Lilith -- the Merciful One save us!-- has dominion over children who issue from a man who has intercourse at candlelight, or with his wife naked, or at times when he is forbidden to have intercourse."
Naftali Bacharach, Sefer Emek ha-Melech

Sketches 5

Here's a few more sketches while I get caught up on some freelance work. I'm also working on a new batch of creatures that'll be a bit different from the stuff I've posted on here so far. It's a new group I've categorized as "Gods In Human Form" and I'm pretty pumped about it. Don't worry they won't be angelic looking Roman gods/goddesses (although there are some Roman/Greek guys in there), but humanoid gods that still fit with the rest of the work I've been doing on here. Anyway, on to the sketches!
Hydra is up first and this is a really simple sketch. I mostly based her on the Leviathan drawing I'd done earlier for a gallery show so I didn't need much in the way of concept design.

The Cat From Saturn gave me some trouble so he got a more extensive sketch. It's really close to the finished drawing but smaller.


I think the Living Arabesque was one of the most bizarre creatures HPL has ever described. However, the sketch is simple and didn't take too long. The final drawing was a bit harder because of all the doodley details.

Ok, hopefully, I'll have a new post for you at the beginning of next week. Until then you can check this cool nerd stuff out. Some father and son team customized their copy of Hive with my drawings! You can see it here.

LIVING HILL

LIVING HILL

"The great hill hung close over the old town,
A precipice against the main street’s end;
Green, tall, and wooded, looking darkly down
Upon the steeple at the highway bend.
Two hundred years the whispers had been heard
About what happened on the man-shunned slope-
Tales of an oddly mangled deer or bird,
Or of lost boys whose kin had ceased to hope.

One day the mail-man found no village there,
Nor were its folk or houses seen again;
People came out from Aylesbury to stare-
Yet they all told the mail-man it was plain
That he was mad for saying he had spied
The great hill’s gluttonous eyes, and jaws stretched wide."
H.P. Lovecraft, The Fungi From Yuggoth

UNHEARD OF REPTILE

UNHEARD OF REPTILE

"27-Life and Deat; Death—its desolation and horror—bleak spaces—sea-bottom—dead cities. But Life—the greater horror! Vast unheard-of reptiles and leviathans—hideous beasts of prehistoric jungle—rank slimy vegetation—evil instincts of primal man—Life is more horrible than death."
H.P. Lovecraft, Commonplace Book