Saturday 3 July 2010

The Hills Rise Wild!

Another piece from the art cache!

I did some art for various sorts of non-computer games around 2000 or so; D&D, Call of Cthulhu variant and a really cool one called Unknown Armies. The publisher of Unknown Armies asked me to do some art for a Lovecraftian board game they were publishing.

Lovecraftian in that it was based on his stories, not that you'd realize we were all merely insignificant ants in the face of the ancient and uncaring powers of the cosmos. Felt I should clear that up.

Anyway, it was a bit of a goofy-riff on The Dunwich Horror where the monsters were all backwoods rednecks in addition to being genetically corrupt monstrosities. I think there's a redundancy in there. . .

So, the main image was a deep one in torn jeans with a shotgun.
Painted this in acrylics -- might be one of the last few things I did in that medium before going digital. I used gesso to build up the textures on the book -- the Cthulhu clasp is practically a relief sculpture.

The original is 14 x 20" on primed 140lb. watercolor paper.

Tempted to rework this a little, but that sort of thing is always a question of finding the time.

The deadline was approaching faster than I planned so I did the inserted images with markers on vellum -- no idea what happened to those pieces, but I expect they'll have faded to nothing by now.

I found a small jpeg of the game online -- apparently some outlets are still selling it. No idea how you play it since I can't recall ever seeing a copy of the game.


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