Originally illustrated traditionally and inked by hand with a brush, which wasn't a lot of fun, but the results are pretty good. Colored digitally.

This was originally done as a cover for an exclusive hardcover collection of my dark humor, cult favorite, comic, Arsenic Lullaby. Featuring the absurd, obscure but dangerously powerful, stage magician ,The Great Duranti and Arsenic Lullaby's version of Cthulhu.

NOW...here's the thing that's maddening about doing work for print. FIRST, the thing gets covered with logos, and cropped/chopped off. The detail in the background was no easy task and all of it serves a purpose to the composition. Some of the details are just, frankly, my own madness/joy. For instance along the back wall the circular framed images are all rough, tiny, illustrations of the planets that were in ascension on the date the Cthulhu had been fortold to rise from the watery depths to plague mankind, according to the mythos. Probably didn't need to go through all that trouble...considering, until now, no one had even been able to see any of that because it was covered by logo's. But what the hell, right?
SECOND, aside from the logos and cropping/trimming away of parts of an illustration, the colors are never, ever the same when printed as they are on the screen. You fine tune them as best you can, knowing full well that the printing machine is not going to be able to match them. Sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse, but it's never the same.

AND...inevitably, for me anyway, after you get some time away from it and see it in print, all the aspects of the coloring that were vexing you go away and you realize a bunch of changes that could have made it better.

Before minting this, seeing as I now had a chance and excuse to fix things, I recolored the whole thing. It's much better, has a creepier mood and tone.

Which is all a long way of saying that this is a full, complete, version of this illustration that NO ONE HAS SEEN BEFORE.

300dpi at 2637x4081