INTERDIMENSIONAL SPIRIT

INTERDIMENSIONAL SPIRIT
"It was incredible, surely, but there, opposite and slightly above me, were shapes of some indeterminate sort among the willows, and as the branches swayed in the wind they seemed to group themselves about these shapes, forming a series of monstrous outlines that shifted rapidly beneath the moon. Close, about fifty feet in front of me, I saw these things."

"I saw it through a veil that hung before my eyes like the gauze drop-curtain used at the back of a theater—hazily a little. It was neither a human figure nor an animal. To me it gave the strange impression of being as large as several animals grouped together, like horses, two or three, moving slowly."

"They first became properly visible, these huge figures, just within the tops of the bushes -- immense, bronze-coloured, moving, and wholly independent of the swaying of the branches. I saw them plainly and noted, now I came to examine them more calmly, that they were very much larger than human, and indeed that something in their appearance proclaimed them to be not human at all. Certainly they were not merely the moving tracery of the branches against the moonlight. They shifted independently. They rose upwards in a continuous stream from earth to sky, vanishing utterly as soon as they reached the dark of the sky. They were interlaced one with another, making a great column, and I saw their limbs and huge bodies melting in and out of each other, forming this serpentine line that bent and swayed and twisted spirally with the contortions of the wind-tossed trees.  They were nude, fluid shapes, passing up the bushes, within the leaves almost -- rising up in a living column into the heavens. Their faces I never could see. Unceasingly they poured upwards, swaying in great bending curves, with a hue of dull bronze upon their skins."

"For just as the body swung round to the current the face and the exposed chest turned full towards us, and showed plainly how the skin and flesh were indented with small hollows, beautifully formed, and exactly similar in shape and kind to the sand-funnels that we had found all over the island."   

'"Their mark!" I heard my companion mutter under his breath. "Their awful mark!"'

Algernon Blackwood, The Willows

The most drastic of my redrawings from this week, I did a complete overhaul on the interdimensional spirits from The Willows.

In my original drawing I completely missed the reference to horses. Now I know this doesn't suggest that Blackwood meant they looked exactly like horses or even at all like horses but I don't think it's a random mention. Whenever I do these drawings I take all things in the story into consideration; Was the author referencing another story or author? Was have subsequent authors referenced this story? Did the author reference other creatures or animals in passing in the story? That's usually a big one for me. If the author, even unconsciously mentions an animal or creature, however briefly, in the story I run with it. It's like a clue.

There are also other illustrations of this story where the artists interpret the interdimensional spirits as human spirits (similar to my original drawing). Upon reflection this doesn't fit the Weirdness of the story for me. I wanted something more animal and strange for this new version and I'm much happier with the results.