The Monster in the Cellar

Click download to see this image at 100% resolution!

To explain this image properly requires an annoying amount of links.

First of all, I have the honor of being a member of an awesome blog called Creature Spot [link] . It's a collective blog of some of the best creature designers in the fields of illustration and concept art. Recently, we've been experimenting with monthly themes, in which the artists of the blog each post their own interpretation of a certain theme, if they want to. The theme was September was to draw, or redesign, a monster from an old pulp magazine called Strange Tales. I did a terrible job of sticking to the theme; I painted this in October, and it turns out it's from a different magazine, Tales of Suspense!
This faintly ridiculous being is from a tale called "The Monster in my Cellar." The image I was working from to create this can be found here: [link] . Later, doing research, I found out that the image I'd been working from was a completely inaccurate rendition of the original monster from the story. The image I worked from shows the monster as a cyclops action figure with a lizard tail, while the original is much more lizard-like in overall form. Look here: [link] .

Another thing about this painting that might interest you is that I painted almost all of it live, recording it onto Livestream dot com. I had a great time chatting with my Deviantart and Facebook friends while painting this. If you're interested, you can watch recordings of these sessions. I warn you, though, that it's fragmented into many smaller videos, and each video has some dead spots where I'm just chatting and not painting (the chat part is not recorded, so it just appears that I'm doing nothing).
If ya still wanna watch, here's a link to my Livestream channel: [link] .

I was originally going to give this guy the full Moai treatment and write a story to accompany it. However, though several ideas and images popped into my head, no story solidified, so I present it to you storyless.