Marie WheelerHappy Monday!
Moving forward in the filling of the art journal is the Deep Ones. First described in ‘Dagon‘, they play a more pivotal role in ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth‘ and always manage to elicit a bit of terror in me! Slimy and cold is always terror, right?
The Deep Ones are described in ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ as such,
“I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.“
If memory serves, and please do correct me if I’m wrong, the story allows that the residents of Innsmouth, due to a long past deal made for wealth, will slowly turn into Deep Ones as they age and eventually move to the sea. It’s odd to think of a human metamorphosis, especially one that would essentially go in reverse of evolutionary paths.
Enough story time conjecture, here’s the art!
So, as always, I struggled with the face, but I feel like it’s getting better. It’s not as I have it in my head, but I wanted the idea of a deep one in the foreground and Devil’s Reef, pre-bombing, in the background. As usual, I used the Inktense Pencils and Distress Inks on 140 lb watercolor paper and used Google Translate to find the Arabic for ‘deep ones’ and ‘Devil’s Reef’ so that I could add it to the page and keep in theme.
Hope you enjoyed and see you next Monday for my rendering of the Elder Things!
