Grab your markers kids and let’s color in some eldritch dread!
Chaosium has made a coloring book from the art for Call of Cthulhu and it’s free for download. [chaos]
They are even having a competition. [chaos]
I was horribly disappointed to discover that Lovecraft was a fucking dumbass racist. It makes sense (this is not attempting to forgive him, at all) – the US has always been deeply racist, but at the time when Lovecraft was writing, the aether was full of horrors like Madison Grant’s The Passing Of The Great Race and Goddard’s The Kallikak Family. Americans were bombarding themselves with justifying pseudo-science that bolstered their racism, and a science fiction/horror writer would tend to be exposed to those concepts.
Representing R’lyeh always seems like a fun challenge to me – how can you do a painting of a city that has geometry that supposedly cannot be contained on your page?
There’s always Robert Bloch and his Cthulhu stories. Maybe I’ve just never heard of anything distasteful, but as far as I know, there isn’t.
The old ones rising from their sleep in April? Please don’t get my hopes up
I find that ocean scene very beautiful and strangely comforting?
Tor have a long-running series ”Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s sandbox, from those who inspired him to those who were inspired in turn.” if you are looking for Lovecraftian work with a more modern sensibility. https://www.tor.com/tag/h-p-lovecraft/
Technically the three-dimensional world cannot be represented on a page, merely a two-dimensional projection of it. Which seems fine to us, because that is very nearly what our retinas detect. I say “very nearly” because our retinas are concave, which means the projection is, strictly speaking, non-euclidean.
Which brings us back to R’lyeh. Just draw it as it appears. Your eyes and the fraying sanity behind them will do the rest.
Callinectes @ #5: Two nits to pick:
1. The fact that our retinas are curved is neither here nor there, because the processing in the brain compensates for that. You don’t see the world pincushion or barrel as you turn your eyes; to you, the projection appears practically perfectly flat.
2. The curvature of the retinas is embedded in the regular Euclidean space (or very nearly Euclidean, as far as we can measure). Strictly speaking, the projection on the retina is no less Euclidean than the objects we observe.
But I can clearly see the lines of perspective twist in the corners of my vision as I move my eyes.
Oh wonderful. This looks like fun!