For the last 6 month or so what little time I’ve had between my day job, my family and designing t-shirts to make a little extra cash, I have been practicing my black & white skills by drawing Lovecraftian horrors. I had about 8 or 10 done when I started thinking about how much I would have loved to have them as coloring pages as a kid.
So even though coloring books are too trendy and I will be late (as usual) to that particular show, even though there is already plenty of Cthulhu on every horizon, even though there are already good Lovecraft Monster coloring books out there, I will be moving forward with these illustrations as a coloring book.
I just made a pretty good case for why I shouldn’t do so. Let me say then why I think I should:
a) Coloring is a great way to spend time. While it may be trending right now, I don’t think it deserves to die a natural death like most trends do. I know first hand how relaxing it can be to spend an hour or two at the end of the day getting lost in being creative and it shouldn’t be just for us fancy pants art types. Anyone can and should benefit from that and coloring, your own art or that of someone else, is as good a way to unwind as any. Way better, safer and cheaper than drugs. Again, first hand experience speaking.
b) Lovecraft and Cthulhu may be wildly popular, in part due to public domain issues, but let me speak to my HPL street-cred. I have been reading his works since I was 9 and even knew what batrachian meant by the age of 11. That means about 37 years of reading (with dictionary at hand), visualizing, and drawing these beasties. Long before they were popular. Long before the vast majority of even the geek conglomerate were down with HPL. So I am an OG HPL, if I may be so bold. I am no expert but I am a long time dabbler.
c) I love to see other artists interpretations of the various creatures. Lovecraft was so frequently vague in his descriptions that we have a lot of breathing room for our imagination. But my own style and interpretations are just as viable and I seem to get a very enthusiastic response from fans at conventions to my versions. In particular, I shared a dozen or so of these illustrations recently and had great response to the idea of them being presented in coloring book form.
So now I am about 18 or 19 images in and committed to getting a quality coloring book out into a sea of others, probably to watch it swiftly disappear with a sense of mild satisfaction.
For now here are a few more images from the project.