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October 27, 2006
monster month - 18
by sven at 8:00 am
Further sketches, contributing to Jeffrey Roche's "Monster Month" event.
Tall trunk like a tree. Something like the skull of an elephant for a head... But with two elephantine trunks, each ending in a beach-ball-sized eye. Several more enormous eyes sway and twist on prehensile stalks down the sides of the beast. Two long snakes of muscle serve as legs.
This alien intelligence is diplomatic in character... Amenable to joint ventures, should they be in the common interest. Its appearance is tremendously unnerving to human explorers, however, as the over-sized eyes are the only (nightmarishly) familiar aspect of its body. Astronauts encountering the "eye-tree" are apt to act rashly.
(Based on an illustration I did for a short story back in junior high.)
A box with legs. A prison cell... A cell block. The cramped space inside this box traps a single person at a time. The prisoner is transported hither and thither by the thing's surreal spider legs.
Where are the prisoners taken? Are the blocks stacked one upon another, in tall, forgotten aisles of the damned? Are the poor souls deposited in the presence of some higher power? Face and hands pressed against glass, the person inside anxiously calls out for help as they're transported to who-knows-where...
posted by sven | October 27, 2006 8:00 AM | comments (3) | categories: bestiary, sketchbook
Comments
So, you've been freakie for a while then. xxo
Posted by: shelley Noble at October 27, 2006 3:12 PM
the "spider-legged cellblock" reminds me, for some reason, of the beetle critters in "the dark crystal."
Posted by: gl. at October 27, 2006 3:22 PM
@Shells: Yep. It was Star Wars that done me in. After that, nuthin' but robots, spaceships, and alien critters for me...
@gl: Dark Crystal was on my mind, too. There were those bat creatures that held little bits of ruby and spied on the Gelflings for the Skeksis... Which, when I saw Mirror Mask, also seemed very similar to the spiders with eyeballs that did spying work for the dark queen. Yep -- the idea of spidery legs carrying something something quasi-mechanical that serves a supernatural master -- clearly derivative.
As for the big beetle creatures from Dark Crystal, the Garthin, they were actually much more in my mind when I was drawing the quadrapede.
Posted by: sven at October 28, 2006 11:34 AM