Inky Darkness

Rev. Marx has an interesting post on creating your own inks out of walnut hulls and pokeweed. His detailed look at the process even has a death defying climax involving potential pokeweed poisoning.

Black Walnut Ink is a deep brown almost sepia tone water based ink made from the rotted hulls (the green fleshy casing around the nut) of black walnuts. There are plenty of web sites out there that talk about how to make Black Walnut Ink. And most of them do it slightly differently. Most advocated collecting black walnuts (still in the hull) off the ground and allowing them to rot and soak for several weeks. While I do have black walnut trees in my area, I did not want to wait several weeks, endure the smell of rotting hulls, or ruin a large pot to have them soak in (it is recommended that you not cook in a pot after using it for this as it is poisonous to humans). It just so happened that I had recently purchased some dried and powdered black walnut hulls from my herb supplier. I don't even know why I had ordered them. Call it kismet.

Cutting Edge

Vonmeer brings us this Mythos Hunters Dagger featuring both the Lovecraft and Derleth versions of the Elder Sign.

Something Fishy

Artist "Dark Wraith" sculpted this very nice interpretation of a Deep One that he calls "The Innsmouth Look". The detail work on the base is very shoggothy, if you know what I mean.

You Are Not Running Your Blog The Way I Think It Should Be Run

One of the pleasures of running Propnomicon is the opportunity to highlight sculpture and artwork I enjoy. Anytime I can throw some attention towards a deserving artist creating fantastic art, in every sense of the word "fantastic", I'm happy to do so. That said, I also have rather particular tastes. Because Propnomicon focuses on occult artifacts in general, and the Cthulhu Mythos in particular, I'm just not interested in works outside of those general parameters.

Why do I bring this up?

Because, apparently, I'm not giving enough exposure to truly deserving artists.

There have been a few incidents over the past year where artists or their advocates have become upset that I'm not interested in their work or, heaven forbid, "not giving it the attention it deserves". Normally I don't let that kind of thing get under my skin, but it's recently escalated to the point of aggravation and it has to stop.

So, to prevent any further problems, I'd like to make everyone aware that I have no interest whatsoever in knit Cthulhu hats, chibi Cthulhu, plush Cthulhu, felt Cthulhu, cartoon-style Cthulhu, or anime Cthulhu. Feel free to substitute the name of any other Mythos entity for "Cthulhu" in all of the above and rest assured that I couldn't care less about them either. That doesn't mean your work isn't wonderful. I'm sure it is. It's just not something I want to cover here.

If, on the other hand, you've created a cool grimoire, sculpted a nasty critter, reproduced an interesting historical document, discovered a cool historical resource, or have a helpful tutorial related to propmaking I'd love to hear from you. 'Cause, you know, that's what my blog is about. All I ask is that you take a few minutes to browse around and get a feel for what I think is nifty before emailing me. Believe me, I love when someone emails me something cool, but I'm just not into the "cute" Mtyhos stuff.

Cthulhu Fhtagn! Heikura Edition

Artist Mikko Heikura sculpted this conveniently sized set of Cthulhu statues.

Of Unknown Origin

Artist William Nezme Zardain brings us this curious specimen. I can't escape the feeling that those horrifically long fingers would be ideal for probing inside the creature's chosen prey.



Update: This is so horribly, horribly wrong on so many levels. Raven gets all the bla...er, credit.

Miskatonic University Hazard Labels

Raven sent over this collection of hazard labels for specimens in the special collections section at Miskatonic University. Here's how they look along with his earlier specimen labels.



The tags can be trimmed out as-is for rectangular labels, or you can use a circular punch and grommet for string-tied warnings attached to the bottle neck. You can download the PDF from Google Docs over here.