A Little of That Ol' Time Religion

It's amazing what you can find on the memory cards of your old digital cameras. Here are some pictures of the first props I created for my "Call of Cthulhu" game way back in the early 90's. Keep in mind that they're heavily compressed, since image size really mattered back in the days of 56k modem connections.

First off, a Cthulhu statue carved from coral for use in the blasphemous rites of the Deep Ones. Although I always like how this one looked I was never happy with it's actual construction. It was about 8" high, sculpted out of regular Sculpey over a wire armature. The terrible mushiness of the polymer clay was a real pain to work with and it took me hours to add the coral texture using a stamper made out of a bundle of toothpicks.


This next one was a generic "Old One" statuette that consisted of a mass of writhing tentacles around a single eye. I was able to incorporate a lot more detail because I finally figured out how much better Super Sculpey and Sculpey III were for sculpting compared to regular Sculpey. This one was about 6" high.





Finally, we have this Cthulhu statue. Although it looks pretty simple it was actually a complicated piece to work on because I was trying to incorporate a believable marbling into the sculpting material. The picture doesn't do the finish justice, since I ended up with deep, intense purple filled with black and metallic silver swirls.

Stop snickering. That's a great color scheme for a Cthulhu artifact. Heh.

The final statue was around 4" high and also marked the first, and last, time I attempted to engrave Sculpey after hardening.




Sadly, all I have left of the statues above are the pictures you see here. I sold off most of my original Cthulhu props on Ebay in the late 90's when I moved back to New York and didn't have enough room to store them. If you happen to be the current owner I'd love to hear from you.