Hey guys. This week I have a to work on a piece for an art benefit I'm organizing with Jeanne D'Angelo and Ryann Casey for Bat Conservation International. I'll post more information about it soon, but just a quick run down. 5.7 million bats have been killed by White Nose Syndrome in the Northeast United States in the last 5 years. This fungus grows on their faces while hibernating, causing them to wake up mid winter, expend precious energy reserves and essentially causing the them to starve to death. We've asked 50 artists from all over the world to make art inspired by bats, bat folklore, or bat mythology, and on April 20th we'll be having a show at Grindcore House in South Philadelphia. ALL proceeds will go to Bat Conservation International.
I've also been working on my dream project, which is collecting all these Yog-Blogsoth drawings in a book. I've been in very loose talks with a publisher, but since that may have turned into a slightly different project, I thought I'd start off with a series of zines. The first volume will be 10 full color 8.5"x 11" pages with hand printed covers. Each volume will have the same amount of pages and will continue until I'm done. I'll probably limit the run of each volume to about 25-50 depending on how much interest there is. Here are the first test pages (I've already tweaked these a lot since shooting this)
Laying this out has made me go through a lot of the older drawings, and not surprisingly, I'm pretty unhappy with a few of them. So, in the next few weeks you'll probably see a bunch of redrawings mixed in with new stuff on here. Some were minor detail changes and in those cases I won't make a new post (like the Incubus is a bit more...um....well endowed now), but for things like the Yithian, Rat Thing (Brown Jenkin), Star Spawn, and Y'm-Bhi, I'll make new posts for the new drawings. Also, as an aside, it'd be cool if you could comment if you'd be interested in one, just so I have an idea of how many I should make...
I also thought some of you might like to see where I've been getting a lot of my quotes and reference for some of these monsters. Jeanne and I have an extensive occult/mythology library that we've been working on for years. Here's a few pics.
These two shelves are what I use most for this blog. I kept the resolution pretty big so you can see the titles if you're interested. The ones I find the most useful (aside from H.P.L.'s stuff) are the Carol Rose books, Giants, Monsters and Dragons and, Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns, and Goblins. Both are presented as encyclopedias, with descriptions of appearance, and folkloric roots for each creature.
On top of all this I still have a bunch more mythos books that I don't have room for in the library (ie; works by Ramsey Campbell, Lin Carter, Stephen King, Richard Tierney, Brian Lumley as well as H.P.L.s predecessors Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, William Hope Hodgson). If you have any questions about any of these books just message me and I'll give you what info I have. Ok, I'll have another post of sketches this week and then next week there will be 5 more monsters popping up in your feed!