8 inches by 12 inches
ink on watercolor paper
February 12, 2012
Monday, February 13, 2012
SLAADI: Slangrel Slaad
On rare occasions, when a Slaad loses an arm or a leg or even a finger or toe, the severed piece stays alive almost like an earthworm. On even rarer occasions, two or more of these severed Slaad slabs will encounter one another, bind themselves together, and form a new being...the Slangrel Slaad. These ghastly, attenuated monstrosities reeking of slime and death are repulsive even to other Slaadi, and are even more troubling because of their bizarre ability to literally travel anywhere at all across all planes of existence. Worming their abhorrently thin bodies into the cracks between the planes, they burrow through the worlds suddenly appearing where they are least expected, and often least desired.
8 inches by 12 inches
ink on watercolor paper
February 12, 2012
8 inches by 12 inches
ink on watercolor paper
February 12, 2012
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
18 comments:
Some wizards spend their lives sewing creatures together, resulting in things like the Owlbear. Others spend their lives (& sometimes, in the case of magicians like Vecna, unlives) cutting up monsters just to see what happens.
I think we've learned which kind of spell-caster you are.
this is my favourite one yet! I want to hallucinate it for ever !
Holy shit this is incredible. I absolutely love it. The line work with the soaked water color is just - god damnit I can't really even put a finger on it.
Just really cool stuff man. I dig.
Your comments continue to delight and honor me Mordicai. I almost feel as if I owe you a debt somehow. But these are much appreciated.
And Vecna! I remember him! The Eye of Vecna and the Hand of Vecna, yes? Great artifacts? Even as a young man I remember feeling that these were suspiciously like the Eye and Hand that Moorcock's hero Corum was given. Is there a connection? Also, is it true that Vecna was named after the great Jack Vance (whose Dying Earth books remain among my all time favorites)?
Scrap Princess, thank you very much. Of all the Slaadi I've drawn so far, this was the most overtly and directly influenced by your own magnificent pieces. So in a sense, it is an homage to you. I am quite pleased you like it!
Awesome, Kyle, you know that means a lot coming from you. When I began this piece, I was seeing something quite different. As I laid in color after color and watched the way they soaked through the paper, something completely different came to mine. This was one of those wonderful experiences where, as I was drawing the piece, it started looking better and better and better to me. A true thrill to make this one.
Yep, Vecna is Gygaxian scramble for Vance! I recently read a bunch of short stories set in the Dying Earth in honor of Jack, too. & no, I don't think it is coincidence that Vecna's hand & eye bear a resemblance to Corum...I've never read those books, though. Elric, Hawkmoon, but not Corum yet. Though I oddly have a roleplaying book about him.
"Gygaxian scramble"...that is PERFECT.
Intriguing that you've read some Elric books (definitely the best of Moorcock's Eternal Champion books) and Hawkmoon but not Corum. I recently re-read all of the Hawkmoon books when they were re-issued and I had such high hopes. I was bitterly disappointed with how rote they all were. They weren't terrible, but I remembered liking them so much more when I was a teenager. I read somewhere that Moorcock wrote the Hawkmoon books almost on a lark, over the course of a weekend or two. Given how by-the-numbers they are (with the possible exception of the concept of Granbretan and the animal masks) that seems feasible.
Anyway, you should track down the Corum books some time. The second trilogy is better than the first, but bother are worth the time.
I think I had a dream about this one last night (the colors and visual impression, though, not the character as such).
I admire your dreams RF. Although I too am grateful that there was (hopefully) no earthworm-y (I just made that descriptor up!) slime. So my question is, are my drawings creeping into your dreams, or are your dreams creeping into my drawings?
Alas (or maybe not), if my dreams were creeping into your drawings, your drawings would involve a lot more bizarre forms of public transportation. And fruit, as featured in a recent dream I had about Scrabble (which my mind, yes, often features somehow) in which I was playing at a tournament and the bag was full of grapes and elderly cherry tomatoes. There was also a 5 tile and a piece of brown cloth with the word EXCELLENCY embroidered on it. Tournament officials were unsympathetic and saw nothing immediately wrong.
"Bizarre forms of public transportation" sounds like an excellent idea for a series of large scale paintings involving biologically based means of mass transport, like being devoured by massive worms which them work their way through thousands of miles of concrete tunnels before excreting hot, slimy passengers at their places of employment.
The Scrabble / fruit thing seems, to me, even stranger and somehow more unsettling than being excreted by a colossal worm / bus. But I did love the phrases "elderly cherry tomatoes" and "nothing immediately wrong." As if somehow, over time, the wrongness might become slowly but unmistakably apparent, causing no end of regret and consternation and their failure to "immediately" recognize it.
My public transportation dreams are 100% mechanical and not nearly so magnificent as that. The bizarreness tends to come from their impracticality of route, confusion of decor, and tendency (in planes) to fly no higher than a hundred feet and wallow regularly to earth.
Ah, mechanical, I see. I think it's the product of seeing the first "Alien" movie in the theater as a 10 year old and being terrified beyond all possibility by the body violence / male rape symbolism / bio-organic monstrosity triumvirate but I seem to be oddly unable to separate the mechanical from the biological in my head often. I am still fighting to disabuse myself of the notion that if I were to lift the hood of, say, a city bus I'd see a large toothy mouth inside eating oil pellets or something.
Although I am really taken by the image of planes flying no higher than 100 feet from the ground, and wallowing back to earth. That's powerful, and oddly horrifying.
That strikes me as an important Kish insight (perhaps as one I should've seen much earlier).
This is the part of the comment when I cite the "Army of Me" video.
I'm fairly certain that with this new insight, much of my older art (which you, more so than many visitors to this blog, have seen a great deal of and for a much longer time) will take a different shape and make a different kind of sense. I have always worn my influences a bit broadly and obviously, I suppose.
I've always felt that that makes them more useful. Denial of influence takes a lot of energy.
I like the way you put that, RF. It helps with some of the self-loathing you know I struggle with. Thanks.
Post a Comment