Creating Cthulhu, part 1

Every sculptor (and I feel a little arrogant using that term) in the genre of where I'm interested, seems to have done a Cthulhu statue of some sort, at some time. The first one I came across was done by Richard Allen Poppe, who seems to have vanished from the internet. He did some really great stuff, sold mostly through eBay - but eventually his accounts (both eBay and PayPal) were shut down apparently from too much bad press. I had some minor communication with him, he seemed like a decent guy to me - but for whatever reason just wasn't able to keep up with the demand for this work and ultimately gave up. At least that's my impression of it, I could be completely wrong. While there are others who would love to bad mouth him, I won't do it here because I don't really know the truth.

This here is one of the few remaining images or mentions of him I could find online:
http://www.templeofdagon.com/artists/richard-allen-poppe/
http://in-tenebris-scriptus.blogspot.com/2007/12/richard-allen-poppe.html
http://propnomicon.blogspot.com/2010/11/cthulhu-fhtagn-poppe-edition.html
http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=4832

Of course there have been others, dozens and dozens of others, but his Cthulhu sculpture was the first one I really liked and the only I ever purchased - not to say the others sucked, but for whatever reason, his stuck out to me. Just do an image search for Cthulhu and you'll see what I mean, they range from fucking awesome, to a little crappy, from freakish to funny and everything in between.

So I felt it was about time to give it a try myself. A little while ago, just for fun, I did a Mayan inspired Cthulhu totem, very simplistic at best - but it served it purpose for what I wanted to do with it. But I still wanted to do a good attempt that would fit in with the countless others, so I started this week - with the intention of mass production (on a small scale of course) for sale online.

 

This here is a very rough blocking out of my version of Cthulhu, about 5-6 hours I guess at this point. The picture doesn't really do it justice, as seems to happen so often when I take pictures of things I've sculpted. I wanted the head to be rather massive and out of all the ones I've seen and mostly none of even tried to capture, is a bit of a sense of weight. Most of the times his tentacles just seem to float or be totally weightless, whether or not I succeed at this is another question - maybe there's a reason you don't see it, maybe it just doesn't work very well.

It's about 7 1/2 inches tall, might be slightly taller in the end. The final version will be mostly likely cast in resin, haven't decided on any sort of colouring or whatnot. I can say it won't be realistically painted, I'm making it as though it were a statue, not a real version of him.

I'm not going to do wings, most other variations have wings, the Poppe version I have doesn't have wings either and I kinda like it like that, less cluttered feeling I think.

I'm hoping to keep updating this, with less rambling, as I progress and even hope to get some pictures of the moulding and casting process. If I remember to do it.