My Children!

Back in April I shared some old photos of props I'd made over ten years ago and sold on Ebay. At the time I was heavily involved with a murder mystery dinner theater company and an associated Cthulhu LARP. As soon as we were done using a prop I usually sold it to help fund the production of even more props.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there's a photo set from Eric Augustson up on Flickr featuring some of those items. Keep in mind that these pictures were taken back when most people were still using dial-up internet services, so they're shockingly small compared to the kind of bandwidth devouring shots I post these days. Here's a sampling from the set:



The R'lyeh Tablet. Sculpey over armature wire with an inset glass gem. This is the front side.



A close-up showing the Elder Sign under the glass.



The back side of the tablet. I used a metallic green blend of Sculpey for the tablet and then coated it with about ten layers of clear acrylic. It wasn't until I was done that I realized it was so slick there was a good chance anyone handling it was going to drop it.



One of my "Ammonite" style Cthulhu idols. I still use this basic pattern with Cthulhu's head flowing out of a seashell shape because I think it looks interesting. The traditional "fat squid sitting on rock" depiction of Cthulhu is great, don't get me wrong, but I've always liked alternate interpretations.

If memory serves, the distance between the single eye in front and the back of the coiled seashell shape was only about 2 1/2 inches. This particular idol was an insanely detailed mass of tentacles.



From the front.



A faux-coral Cthulhu statuette. It took hours to create the thousands of pores in it using a tool crafted from toothpicks and a rubber band.



A copy of the Ponape Scriptures. The cover was finished in the faux-leather technique David Lowe used in his "creepy books" tutorial I linked to last month. The cover embellishment is a large glass gem surrounded by a Sculpey adornment.



A tribal-style Cthulhu sigil I came up with while fooling around with the Tattooz1 dingbat font. Most of the graphics in this particular book were created using combinations of characters in that font.

Check out the rest of the pictures in the set. You won't have the wave of nostalgia I had looking at them, but there's some interesting stuff to look at.