FRÉMIET DEMON

FRÉMIET DEMON

"French sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet merged the contemporary fascination with medieval imagery—particularly gargoyles—with his lifelong zoological studies. The gothic influence shows in each creature’s set of batlike wings, while the pelican’s mismatched but eerily realistic frog body displays Frémiet’s naturalist bent."

The Chicago Art Institute

YATES THOMPSON DEMON

YATES THOMPSON DEMON

"The devils shown tormenting the saint have become much more imaginative in form. One is based on a lobster, two have accessory faces in their abdomens, and they are starting to depart from nature."

Hoakley, The Story In Paintings: The Temptation Of Saint Anthony, Before 1560

*This demon is inspired by the painting Saint Anthony And Tormenting Demons, a page from an illuminated version of Jean de Vignay, La Légende Dorée, Volume II from 1465-1475

FGS DEMON

 FGS DEMON

"The scene—featuring a monstrous creature conjured by an evil rite, a terrified sorcerer fleeing the scene, and an unsuspecting, bound child destined for sacrifice—clearly reveals its debt to the paintings of magic and witchcraft created by Salvator Rosa during his Florentine period (autumn 1639–1650), works that were highly coveted by connoisseurs."

Gonnelli

*This demon is inspired by the painting A Scene Of Witchcraft (1674) by FGS.

UVUUDAUM

UVUUDAUM

"An uvuudaum is a humanoid creature with two standard human arms that protrude from the torso where expected, but whose lower body has six arms instead of legs, splayed spiderlike below it (tough loose clothing somewhat drapes its grotesque legs). The real horror is the taillike appendage replacing what would be a head on a normal creature. At the very end of the appendage is an ironhard spike."

Andy Collins, Bruce R. Cordeil & Tomas M. Reid, Epic Level Handbook

SIBRIEX

SIBRIEX

"The unsettling stink of rotting flowers surrounds the large, bloated figure that floats lazily in the air. The demon is hardly more than a malformed face the size of a wagon. Where its ears should be are instead a pair of atrophied arms with hands ending in tremulous digits. Instead of a body, everything below its neck is a writhing nest of puckers and stalks. It is tethered to the surrounding ground by four steel chains that end in razor-sharp spikes."

Ed Stark, Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss

RUTTERKIN

RUTTERKIN

"Rutterkin look much like ugly humans or humanoids. They are nearly hairless and have pointed skulls, large features and backward pointing ears. Rutterkin have misshapen bodies and limbs. They are one of the weakest but most bullying kinds of demons."

Gary Gygax, The Lost Caverns Of Tsojcanth

"This hunched and misshapen figure stands 6 feet tall. Its features are asymmetrical and deformed, and its mottled green and violet skin is hairless except for one or two uncomfortable looking patches of wiry bristles. The fiend has an elongated head with tiny red eyes that swell with hate."

Ed Stark, Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss

MIND FLAYER

MIND FLAYER

"This is a super-intelligent, man-shaped creature with four tentacles by its mouth which it uses to strike its prey. If a tentacle hits it will then penetrate to the brain, draw it forth, and the monster will devour it."

Gary Gygax, Strategic Review Volume 1 Number 1

The mindflayer's skin glistens with slime. Its skin color is a nauseous mauve, its tentacles being purplish black, A mind flayer's eyes are a dead while, no pupil being evident. The long fingers of each hand are reddish, but the hands are mauve."

Gary Gygax, Monster Manual I

DHARCULUS

DHARCULUS

"The dharculus is a creature native to the Far Realm. These particularly deadly creatures hunt all other creatures that cross their paths without regard to rank or hierarchy. They possess little fear, being well protected from its prey."

"The dharculus are swimmers of the Border Ethereal; however, they have a singular ability to insert their made tentacle ends into the Prime Material Plane. These tentacles appear as a swarm of blind eel-like creatures slinging through the very air in a deadly school. To those who can see into the Ethereal, the 'eels' are merely the protruding tentacle tips of the dharculus. Following the multiple tentacles back, one would see that they come together in a fused braid, a thick and rigid worm link tube coming the main body of the creature. The posterior end of the cylindrical body loops back towards the front the a giant question mark, ending in a huge, drooling maw filled with razor-sharp teeth. Five of the darculus' tentacle end in eyes instead of manipulator maws;"

Bruce Cordell, The Gates Of Firestorm Peak

INTERDIMENSIONAL TRAVELER

INTERDIMENSIONAL TRAVELER

This one is a bit different than my usual posts. There's no literary, folkloric or mythological source material. My friend Alan (medusawolf) is working on a new comic. In it, a character sees into various other dimensions or universes and the creatures that live therein. Alan left part of 8 panels blank and asked other artists to draw a creature. This weirdo is what I drew. Well, I only drew the head and upper torso for Alan, but I liked the idea so much I went back and drew the entire body. 

I thought this would also be a good time to show a bit of my process. 

First we have my pencil drawing where I originally had a second face on the back of the creature. Followed by the inks where I removed the second face. Then the inks after they'd been cleaned up in Photoshop. Next is the flat color.

Then we have the first part of the rendering process. I started with the head. Then I moved on to the torso and arms and finished with the tail and the final stage. As a bonus, the very last image is the rendered color without the linework.

I'm taking a break for the rest of the week but I'll be back next week with a full week of D&D monsters!

THOUGHT MONSTER

THOUGHT MONSTER

"'There is one alternative: perhaps there was nothing for the dying man to see.'"

"'But,' objected the doctor, 'I thought it was what he saw that killed him.'"

"'Fear,' said Cummings, 'can enter a man's soul through other senses than sight. Anyway, I shall work on that hypothesis for a while, and see where it leads me.'"

"And then the air was filled with something that had being, yet was not made of matter. Great, waving tentacles were groping for my mind, trying to suck it into themselves! With a scream, I rushed from the room. The experiment which I began last fall had succeeded without my knowing it, and I have let a thought-monster loose upon the community!"

"The intelligence that was James Gibson has been swallowed up in the maw of my detestable invention!"

"I can feel its tentacles groping for my mind, trying to read my thoughts."

Amelia Reynolds Long, The Thought Monster

SHAPE FROM THE STREAMING DARK

SHAPE FROM THE STREAMING DARK

 "His vision blurred; her face melted as if tears had come across his eyes."

"Perrin wrenched his eyes from her face 'You're not real You're something which takes the shape of my thoughts. Perhaps you killed Seguilo...'"

"He had believed in the shape called Seguilo; he had believed in the transceiver—and both had slavishly obeyed his expectations. So had the girl, and he had sent her away..."

"No human hands could force the door; it would take the strength of a mastodon, the talons of a rock choundril, the ferocity of a Maldene land-shark..."

"He peered through the window, heart in his mouth. A tall shape, indistinct."

"He listened. It must be near the door now. It would be lifting a heavy warm, the talons would glint in the moonlight."

"He knew what he would see; A black shape tall and round as a pole with eyes like coach-lamps. A huge black arm shoved inside. Perrin saw the talons gleam as the fingers reached for the bolt."

"Tomorrow night the moons would call up no yearning shapes form the streaming dark."
Jack Vance, When The Five Moons Rise

UNIQUE LEPIDOPTERA

UNIQUE LEPIDOPTERA

"Feathery antennae and the two forelegs issued forth, the legs clutching the cocoon in order to hoist the body through the narrow aperture. The furry and distended abdomen, upon which were hinged the crumpled wings, was drawn out with effort."

"Surely this specimen before him was unique. The wings were easily ten inches across and their color was so subtly graduated that it was impossible to say where black turned to purple to green and green back to black. The only definite delineations were a crablike simulacrum centered on each hind wing and upon each fore wing, the imitation of an open mouth with teeth bared. Both the crabs and mouths were chalked in white and vermillion."

John B.L. Goodwin, The Cocoon

TUCKAHOE

TUCKAHOE

"There's a funny kind of toadstool that grows down in the dimmest part of the woods. Tuckahoe, Pa calls them, but Mommas says they aren't like any tuckahoe she's ever seen, and we aren't to eat them under any circumstances. I wouldn't want to anyway, for the sight of them makes my stomach turn somersaults. You never find just one or two, coming up separately around dead wood like regular mushrooms. These tuckahoe like to grow from the heart of a living tree, a hundred or more together in a slippery, gray clump, like overgrown frogs' eggs."

"It couldn't be a tuckahoe, because it was too big, big as a man. Besides that, it was moving, and darn fast, too. Tuckahoe couldn't move by itself, not that I ever heard anyway."

"'Pa', I said, 'I think you should know I saw some kind of strange thing crawling around out here last night, looked like one of those tuckahoe clumps, only almost as big as you are.'"

"There's a crack between the door and the ground, a couple inches maybe. And through that crack came a mess of gray, wet-looking tuckahoe."

Nancy Etchemendy, The Tuckahoe

CARKER

CARKER

"It was a perfect mummy. Either the Indian art had shrunk the bodies, or this was that of a ten-year-old boy. There was no flesh. Only sin and bone and taut dry stretches of tendon between. The eyelids were closed; the sockets looked hollow under them. The nose was sunken and almost lost. The scant lips were tightly curled back from the long and very white teen, which stood forth all the more brilliantly against the deep brown skin."

Anthony Boucher, They Bite

CLAWING FIEND

CLAWING FIEND

"Ghastly shades of bygone gladness,

Clawing fiends of future sadness."

H.P. Lovecraft, Cycle Of Verse

NAMELESS THING

NAMELESS THING

"Black monstrous bridges across oily rivers,

Cobwebs of cable by nameless things spun;

Catacomb deeps whose dank chaos delivers

Streams of live foetor, that rots in the sun."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Cats

SERVITOR OF THE OUTER GODS

SERVITOR OF THE OUTER GODS

"He thought of the ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, at whose centre sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a daemoniac flute held in nameless paws."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Haunter Of the Dark

"Beside it had been carved two squat squid-like figures from a part of which — presumably the heads, though no outline was definitive — projected what must certainly have been instruments of some kind, for the strange, repugnant attendants appeared to be playing them." 

"And flanking it on either side were two lesser beings, equally amorphous, holding pipes or flutes in appendages and making that demoniac music which echoed and reechoed in the enclosing forest."

August Derleth, The Dweller In Darkness

DISTURBINGLY STRANGE INFANT

DISTURBINGLY STRANGE INFANT

"The walls were lined with small cells, in seventeen of which—hideous to relate—solitary prisoners in a state of complete idiocy were found chained, including four mothers with infants of disturbingly strange appearance. These infants died soon after exposure to the light; a circumstance which the doctors thought rather merciful."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror At Red Hook

DEFORMED TWIN

DEFORMED TWIN

"133-Man has miniature shapeless Siamese Twin-exhib. in circus-twin surgically detached-disappears-does hideous things with malign life of his own."

H.P. Lovecraft, Commonplace Book

HEADLESS MOON-CALF

HEADLESS MOON-CALF

"Incubi and succubae howled praise to Hecate, and headless moon-calves bleated to the Magna Mater. Goats leaped to the sound of thin accursed flutes, and aegipans chased endlessly after misshapen fauns over rocks twisted like swollen toads."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror At Red Hook

"Mooncalf was a term formerly ascribed to the abortive fetus of a cow or other farm animal, and also occasionally to that of a human. The term arose from the formerly widespread belief, present in many European folk traditions, that such malformed creatures were the product of the sinister influence of the moon on fetal development."

Webster's Dictionary

URHAG

URHAG

"High over its jagged rim huge ravens flapped and croaked, and vague whirrings in the unseen depths told of bats or urhags or less mentionable presences haunting the endless blackness."

H.P. Lovecraft, Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath

DRAGGING DEAD

THE DRAGGING DEAD

"The dark walls closed me in, and loud I cursed

That ever I had come to such a den,

When suddenly a score of windows burst

Into wild light, and swarmed with dancing men:

Mad, soundless revels of the dragging dead—

And not a corpse had either hands or head!"

H.P. Lovecraft, The Fungi From Yuggoth

VAPOROUS BRAIN

VAPOROUS BRAIN

"It was perhaps that which certain secret cults of earth have whispered of as YOG-SOTHOTH, and which has been a deity under other names; that which the crustaceans of Yuggoth worship as the Beyond-One, and which the vaporous brains of the spiral nebulae know by an untranslatable Sign—yet in a flash the Carter-facet realised how slight and fractional all these conceptions are."

H.P. Lovecraft & E. Hoffman Price, Through the Gates Of the Silver Key

WHITE POLYPOUS THING

WHITE POLYPOUS THING

"There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Call Of Cthulhu

SPAWN OF YOG-SOTHOTH II

 

SPAWN OF YOG-SOTHOTH II

"They's prints in the rud, Mis' Corey - great raound prints as big as barrel-heads, all sunk dawon deep like a elephant had ben along, only they's a sight more nor four feet could make!"

"Bigger’n a barn...all made o’ squirmin’ ropes...hull thing sort o’ shaped like a hen’s egg bigger’n anything, with dozens o’ legs like hogsheads that haff shut up when they step...nothin’ solid abaout it—all like jelly, an’ made o’ sep’rit wrigglin’ ropes pushed clost together...great bulgin’ eyes all over it...ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin’ aout all along the sides, big as stovepipes, an’ all a-tossin’ an’ openin’ an’ shuttin’...all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings... an’ Gawd in heaven—that haff face on top!...”

" 'Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face - that haff face on top of it... that face with the red eyes an' crinkly albino hair, an' no chin, like the Whateleys... It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o' thing, but they was a haff-shaped man's face on top of it, an' it looked like Wizard Whateley's, only it was yards an' yards acrost....' "

H.P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror

MERCURIAN VEGETABLE ENTITY

MERCURIAN VEGETABLE ENTITY

"Later, as the earth's span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space-to another stopping-place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury." 

H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Out Of Time

MUTANT PENGUIN

MUTANT PENGUIN

"For it was only a penguin - albeit of a huge, unknown species larger than the greatest of the known king penguins, and monstrous in its combined albinism and virtual eyelessness."

"Their size reminded us of some of the archaic penguins depicted in the Old Ones’ sculptures, and it did not take us long to conclude that they were descended from the same stock-undoubtedly surviving through a retreat to some warmer inner region whose perpetual blackness had destroyed their pigmentation and atrophied their eyes to mere useless slits."

H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains Of Madness

YEKUBIAN

 

YEKUBIAN

"It was a gigantic, pale-grey worm or centipede, as large around as a man and twice as long, with a disc-like, apparently eyeless, cilia-fringed head bearing a purple central orifice. It glided on its rear pairs of legs, with its fore part raised vertically—the legs, or at least two pairs of them, serving as arms. Along its spinal ridge was a curious purple comb, and a fan-shaped tail of some grey membrane ended its grotesque bulk. There was a ring of flexible red spikes around its neck, and from the twistings of these came clicking, twanging sounds in measured, deliberate rhythms."

Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, H.P. Lovecraft, A. Merrit, C.L. Moore, The Challenge From Beyond

ZOOG

ZOOG

"In the tunnels of that twisted wood, whose low prodigious oaks twine groping boughs and shine dim with the phosphorescence of strange fungi, dwell the furtive and secretive zoogs;"

"Most of them live in burrows, but some inhabit the trunks of the great trees; and although they live mostly on fungi it is muttered that they have also a slight taste for meat, either physical or spiritual, for certainly many dreamers have entered that wood who have not come out."

 "It was the zoogs, for one sees their weird eyes long before one can discern their small, slippery brown outlines."

H.P. Lovecraft, Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath

SPHINX

SPHINX

"There are unpleasant tales of the Sphinx before Khephren—but whatever its elder features were, the monarch replaced them with his own that men might look at the colossus without fear."

"The Great Sphinx! God!—that idle question I asked myself on that sun-blest morning before . . . what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to represent? Accursed is the sight, be it in dream or not, that revealed to me the supreme horror—the Unknown God of the Dead, which licks its colossal chops in the unsuspected abyss, fed hideous morsels by soulless absurdities that should not exist. The five-headed monster that emerged . . . that five-headed monster as large as a hippopotamus . . . the five-headed monster—and that of which it is the merest fore paw. . . ."

H.P. Lovecraft & Harry Houdini, Under the Pyramids 

"The Sphinx was described as having the body and legs of a lion, with the wings of an eagle and its foreparts being the head and torso of a beautiful young woman."

Carol Rose, Giants, Monsters & Dragons

GENIE/DJINN

GENIE/DJINN

"The Genie that haunts the moonbeams spake to the Demon of the Valley, saying, 'I am old, and forget much. Tell me the deeds and aspect and name of them who built these things of Stone.' And the Demon replied, 'I am Memory, and am wise in lore of the past, but I too am old. These beings were like the waters of the river Than, not to be understood. Their deeds I recall not, for they were but of the moment. Their aspect I recall dimly, it was like to that of the little apes in the trees. Their name I recall clearly, for it rhymed with that of the river. These beings of yesterday were called Man.'"
H.P. Lovecraft, Memory 

"They mostly take the shape of a gigantic human but may be invisible or take other shapes, such as that of a vast and grotesque beast."  

 "Their deception may be detected because they will have vertical eyes and the feet of a goat or a camel."

 Carol Rose, Giants Monsters and Dragons

"Surely, I shall fill Hell with jinns and men all together." 

The Noble Qur'an, Huud 11:119

CHIMAERA

CHIMAERA 

"You recall that Pickman’s forte was faces. I don’t believe anybody since Goya could put so much of sheer hell into a set of features or a twist of expression. And before Goya you have to go back to the mediaeval chaps who did the gargoyles and chimaeras on Notre Dame and Mont Saint-Michel."  

H.P. Lovecraft, Pickman's Model  

“Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras—dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies—may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition—but they were there before. They are transcripts, types—the archetypes are in us, and eternal."  

Charles Lamb, Witches and Other Night-Fears (H.P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror)   

"First he sent him away with orders to kill the Khimaira none might approach; a thing of immortal make, not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle, and snorting out the breath of the terrible flame of bright fire." 

Homer, The Iliad  

Her heads were three: one was that of a glare-eyed lion, one of a goat, and the third of a snake, a powerful drakon." 

Hesiod, Theogony 

SHAMIR

SHAMIR

"And when We decreed death for him, nothing showed his death to them save a creeping creature of the earth which gnawed away his staff. And when he fell, the jinn saw clearly how, if they had known the Unseen, they would not have continued in despised toil."

The Quran 34:14

"Allah tells us how Sulayman, peace be upon him, died and how Allah concealed his death from the Jinn who were subjugated to him to do hard labor. He remained leaning on his stick, which was his staff, as Ibn `Abbas may Allah be pleased with him, Mujahid, Al-Hasan, Qatadah and others said. He stayed like that for a long time, nearly a year. When a creature of the earth, which was a kind of worm, ate through the stick, it became weak and fell to the ground. Then it became apparent that he had died a long time before. It also became clear to Jinn and men alike that the Jinn do not know the Unseen as they (the Jinn) used to imagine and tried to deceive people."

Ibn Kathir, The Death Of Sulayman

"They told him schamir was a worm of the size of a barley corn, but so powerful that the hardest flint could not resist him."

"Solomon cut the stones of the temple with the blood of a little worm called thamir, which when sprinkled on the marble, made it easy to split. And the way in which Solomon obtained the worm was this. He had an ostrich, whose chick he put in a glass bottle. Seeing this, the ostrich ran to the desert, and brought the worm, and with its blood fractured the vessel."

Sabine Baring-Gould, Curious Myths Of the Middle Ages

 "In Arabic tradition Solomon, under instructions from Gabriel, has recourse to a worm when he desires to bore through a pearl, and to a white worm when he wishes to thread the onyx."

The Jewish Encyclopedia

BURAQ

 

BURAQ

"Buraq was a riding beast smaller than a mule and larger than an ass, having a face like that of a human being and ears like those of an elephant; its mane was like the mane of a horse; its neck and tail like those of a camel; its breast like the breast of a mule; its feet like the feet of an ox or, according to one tradition, like those of a camel; its hooves were like the hooves of an ox. Its breast looked just like a ruby and its hair resembled white armour, shining brightly by reason of its exceeding purity. On its flanks it had two wings which hid its legs. The swiftness of this riding beast was such that in a single stride it could reach as far as eye could see."

Muhammad Khwandamir, Habib As-Sijar Vol. I Part III

SI'LAH

SI’LAH

"The si‘lah is a variant of the ghul. This djinn is often referred to in the feminine. She resides in jungles and thickets and lays in ambush for her victims. She is described as a wicked and sadistic djinn who tortures her prey, plays games with him, and makes him dance before consuming him."

"The si’luwa is a variant of the s’ilah from Iraq. She is a water demon or water spirit that inhabits the rivers, streams, and canals of Mesopotamia. She has the shape of a woman and is covered in long hair, has pendulous breasts that hang down to her knees, and in some accounts, she is described as having a fishtail instead of legs. She both sets traps for and hunts humans to eat and also seeks human lovers. Local beliefs state that the si’luwa is the product of the intermingling of humans with river demons."
Adam Ali, Demons, Djinns, and Devils of the Medieval Islamic World

ROC

ROC 

"This is the name of an enormous bird, also known as the Rukh, in the legends of Arabia and Middle Eastern countries around the Persian Gulf. The Roc is described as a vast bird that resembled an enormous eagle or vulture, although some accounts say that it is part lion. It was said to have horns on its head and to have such a  huge wingspan and talons that it could grasp an elephant easily and transport it back as food for its young."

Carol Rose, Giants, Monsters and Dragons

DĪV

DĪV

“Dīv in Iranian folktales may act as villains, sorcerers, ogres, fools, or helpers of the protagonist. They may be summoned for help when a bit of their hair, which has been left with the hero for this purpose, is put into the fire. Demons of the folktales may be many headed and come in different colors: white, yellow, and black. They have a tendency to alternate long periods of wakefulness and sleep, each lasting several days, and to become sleepy in sunlight. Typically this unfortunate habit proves to be their undoing. They are capable of magic and transformation.”  Mahmoud Omidsalar, Encyclopaedia Iranica

MANTICORE

MANTICORE

"The martichora was allegedly a blue-eyed, human-faced wild beast, the size of the largest lion, with cinnabar-red fur. It has three rows of teeth, feet and claws like lions. It also had a scorpion-like tail with a (main) terminal sting that measured over 1 cubit, plus two rows of auxiliary stings, each a Greek foot long. The sting was instantly fatal. The stings could be fired sideways, forward, or backward, by orienting the tail accordingly, up to a 1 plethron distance range, and these stings regenerated afterwards. Only the elephant was immune to the poison. And it overcomes every beast except the lion."

Photius, Myriobiblon

GHADDAR

GHADDAR

"Al-Qazwini mentions this djinn briefly and states that its kind inhabits Yemen and the coastal regions of Egypt. It lures its victims to itself and then assaults them. The outcome of this assault could be mild or severe. Lebling states that this demon either tortures its victims viciously or just terrifies them. Al-Qazwini is more explicit, he says that this djinn is either satisfied by terrifying its victim into a state of shock."

"A more extreme outcome of an encounter with the ghaddar, according to al-Qazwini, is that this monster sexually assaults its victims and that there is seldom any hope for survivors of such an assault because the ghaddar has a phallus like a bull’s horn that can kill a human. This djinn must have a terrifying appearance, unfortunately as-Qazwini does not describe any of its physical characteristics other than its phallus."

Adam Ali, Demons, Djinns, and Devils of the Medieval Islamic World