I know it's been a while since I posted but it's been a wild time. For the last year or so I've been quietly working on a book. Well I can now reveal what it is and even the cover! I've been working on an illustrated edition of H.P. Lovecraft's Commonplace Book! There are 30 full page illustrations and 11 spot illustrations and I even designed the whole thing!
For those of you that are unfamiliar, the Commonplace Book was basically Lovecraft's idea journal. There are over 200 entries, some of which are a few paragraphs but most are sentences or even phrases. It's great as fan of his work because you can see which fragments grew into full stories. You can also see which other authors inspired him. I like to view them as improv or RPG prompts.
This also worked out because there was a lot of Lovecraft influence in the early days of D&D. My cover was inspired by supplemental material from that time period, specifically work by Erol Otus.
This also worked out because there was a lot of Lovecraft influence in the early days of D&D. My cover was inspired by supplemental material from that time period, specifically work by Erol Otus.
Now, I've actually illustrated a bunch of creatures mentioned in the Commonplace Book on this blog. But for this project I tried to approach everything with fresh eyes. So in most cases I've completely redesigned things that I'd drawn previously and in some cases I kept the original design but redrew them.
This has been the last year of my artistic life and it's something I'm incredibly proud of. I hope you all grab a copy and enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it!
Speaking of things I'm proud of, you can still get copies of Monstrous Mythologies at Lethe Press!
Man, I thought I was the only one who loved Erol Otus! I think he may have been the very first artist I was ever able to identify by style alone - though possibly it was Eric Carle or Shel Silverstein. This looks really cool. Congrats - I'll most likely pick up a copy!
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