Oh yeah...this

People have been asking me how long that Cthulhu piece took me (see below). And they're understandably surprised when I tell them probably more than 60 hours. It's definitely time-consuming, getting lots of tendrils and tentacles all detailed properly (and there's still some that I'm not quite happy with). But as I said, I had a lot of misfires on this, picking up the sketch after few weeks or months and trying it different ways. Most of those misfires are posted below, but I'd forgotten about this one I'd started in pencil...

So whereas I'd like to play it off like I could just whip something up, it's really more like something I failed and failed at, until I had my Old Man and the Sea moment.

Cthulhu...

I think this one is done. Check the bottom of this post to see all the different directions this piece took.

This started out as a rejected sketch from an old project: 

I flipped the sketch and tried something else that was intended to be a square format, but that didn't feel very epic: 

I liked the idea of the car running away, so I changed the format so that the car became the focus of kind of a silly story. This one was being formatted for a skateboard shape, but the 'story' just felt dopey: 

Finally I changed it up so that the story is simpler, more somber and quiet:

This was a composition and story I could live with. I had been, at the time, working on a Photoshop painting style. It's a good style, but incredibly tedious for all the tentacles and suction cups etc. I shelved the idea after a few frustrating misfires like this: 

Blechh. Well, this week I decided to take it off the shelf and finish it. 

See above.

Cthulhu: Take 4

Well, I've reopened the case on this Cthulhu image. Decided to do it the way I do it. I'm maybe about halfway done. Click to enrage the image.