Attack on the 'Elder Ones'

Ok so as I said before I’d hunt down and detail a description of the old ones so as i was doing that i got rather side track and started hunting down book covers and illustrations to depict ‘The mountains of madness’ or anything described in it such as ‘the old ones’ and their city.
I did make a bit of a discovery though which has helped me out endlessly ‘the old ones’ as Lovecraft names them in the book are also referred to as the ‘elder things’
Anyway so description wise:

Old ones had fan like wings, lateral crinoids (half moon, claw like/feathery kind of star/tree like) tentacle arms
Lower tentacles containing fake/false star feet
Inhuman head with 6 pointed inscribed mounds
‘Several distinct triangular striated point’ (Footprints ridged)
Hacking incisions and straight penetrating bored in bones of other animals etc
‘Barrel shaped fossil of wholly unknown nature; probably vegetable unless overgrown specimen of unknown marine radiata’
Tough as leather but flexible
Dark grey
8ft long in all, with 6ft, 3.5ft diameter 5 ridged barrel torso, tapering to 1 foot at each end
Barrel with 5 budging ridges in place of staves (rings across body/back etc)
Stalks at the equator in the middle of ridges
Furrow between ridges also has large fan like wings sprouting or folded into? (maybe ridges go down?)
Wings a lighter grey with serrated edges
7ft wing spread (14ft wingspan) –membranous stretched on glandular tubing with ting holes at tips of wings
Apex of ridges 5 system of light grey tentacles max length 3ft (like arms of primitive crinoids)
Single stalk 3inch diameter at 6inch splits to 5 sub stalks, after 8inch branches into tapering tentacles or tendrils (each stalk 25 tentacles total)
Blunt bulbous light grey neck atop torso with gills
Yellowed head 5 pointed like starfish covered in 3inch hair like stuff (sparse) of prismatic colours, 2ft point to point head, thick +puffy with 3 inch yellowish tubes on each point, with yellow sphere and red eye inside, slit in top centre of star for breathing, inner edges of star contain slender long tubes with bell shaped mouth of 2inch diameter lines with teeth.
Bottom end of torso houses green starfish arrangement on bulbous grey neck like thing, with red 2ft tubes tapering from 3 inch to 1 inch orifices at tip (red tubes eliminate waste matter)
Muscular arms 4ft long, 7inch at base 2 2.5inch at tip triangle, 5 ridged, 8inch long +6 wide
Echinoderm resemblance unmistakable
1 part vegetable 3 parts animal
-----

On my hunt I turned up a number of illustrations of the old ones all slightly differing due to artist interpretation but showing you a range should give u a bit of an understanding of them (along with the massive description above which I’m sure no one will read)

After reading in the ‘Mountains of madness’ itself of illustrator ‘Clark Ashton Smith’ doing illustrations of the ‘Necronomicon’ (The anthology of Lovecrafts work’s also written about him in many of his story as being a book writtern by ‘the mad Arab’ ‘Abdul Alhazred’ a fictional character created by Lovecraft) I decided to hunt down whether there was such a person and whether he had actually done any illustrations, and I found him:
Cthulhu

An old one (Differing somewhat from the ‘old ones’ in ‘mountains of madness’)

Another old one (Also differing somewhat from the ‘old ones’ in ‘mountains of madness’)

I also have a hunch this cover for ‘Astounding Stories’ is also by Smith as well as I remember reading something about it being one of his but I can’t seem to find anything saying that now...
But the picture is of a ‘Shaggoth’ chasing two of the explorers who stumbled into the ‘old ones’ ruined city


I also found this cover image out to be by Ian Miller


Another cover image for ‘Mountains of Madness’ this one by Raymond Bayless


I found a few more YouTube videos
(This time I actually went looking for them and I turned up lots of mock trailers and stuff)
This one’s good with the annotations on
(It’s quite interesting to see where all the bits of clip come from)

I also found this little animation of a CG ‘elder thing’ spawning doesn’t match the description 100% on but it quite cute :P

This is an animation I found about Lovecraft dreaming up his idea’s and its a nice little piece so thought I’d post it up


Then I found some Cthulhu picture by a guy names Toren Atkinson, and I like his style so I thought I’d post these up to:



Christina Rodriguez – Illustration from the book The Antarctic Express showing an ‘Elder thing’


I came across some picture’s which seem to be an illustrated story version of ‘mountains of madness’ as well although I couldn’t find much of it but these pictures seemed to turn up a fair bit and the annoying thing is I couldn’t find who they were by either?





I also turned up a number of older drawings of the ‘old ones’ and their city as well such as this one by Harry Morris drawn in 1979

As well as this one by Jeff Remmer but I can’t seem to find out when it was done


Image by Dean Kuhta of the ‘Old ones’ city


Here’s a few more pictures of the ‘Old ones’ or ‘Elder creatures’ which is how I managed to find these pictures, but again couldn’t find out the artists etc



After a while of hunting and general surfing I came across this picture by Danny Cruz, and after seeing this I was lead to DeviantART

Which then led me to these illustrations of the ‘Old Ones’:
This illustration also by Danny Cruz:

*note – Artist names from here down are as they appear on DeviantART*
Henning

King Rastel

Zippo4k

Pahko

SOMK

After some hunting through DeviantART I came across the work of John Cherevka aka Skullbeast (DeviantART username) and a CG ‘old one’ I found this in its earlier stages while generally browsing but then re-encountered it and the difference between the low end CG model VS the ZBrush combined model is pretty immense, Its starting to make me wish I’d attacked a character as oppose to the city (maybe next project)
Anyway here’s a run through of Cherevka’s ‘Old one’
*THIS IS NOT MY WORK*








This one’s my personal favourite




I’ve also just discovered that there’s going to be a film made of Lovecrafts ‘Mountains of madness’ made by Universal Studios, directed by Guillermo del Toro Gómez. Director of Blade 2, Hellboy, and Pan’s Labyrinth.
I’d never heard of him either...
But I recognize these film and apparently he’s going to be directing The Hobbit and a Pinocchio film in the future (I’m guessing that will be a dark twisted kind of one as oppose to happy Disney style :P)

Another little thing I came across was ‘The Antarktos Cycle’ a series of short stories based around the ‘Old Ones’ and the ‘Mountains of madness’
As well as this Spanish site about the ‘Mountains of Madness’ which Windows was nice enough to translated for me
But I’ll go into that in the next post if it turns up anything as I haven’t had a chance to read up on them yet :)