Once again, I’ve created a new ink for the Alphabeasts project (alphabeasts.tumblr.com). This time, I had a bit of a quandary, since there are a few creatures that start with “F” that I thought might be interesting.
Of course, there’s the faun from El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth). But I have an interesting ink in mind to show both the faun and Ofelia, and I didn’t think it would work for this project. The eye would be on both of them, not just the faun, so I thought it lost the spirit of this project a bit.
Next up, the Fell Beasts of Tolkien’s mythos. They are wicked, terrible monsters, and I thought they would be fun as well. But in my mind, I couldn’t really separate the Nazgul from the Fell Beast, so I decided not to do that one either.
At the end of the day, the one that really stuck in my head was from The X-Files. Now, I know you kids probably don’t know what that is (young punks anyway), but in the 90’s The X-Files was a big show. One of the best, and creepiest, of the episodes featured a fascinating type of creature called a “flukeman”.
Basically, Chernobyl radiation picked up by Russian tankers ended up turning simple flukes (flat worms, go look it up) into man-sized flukemen. Who were kind of violent.
Since I have a great reference on the top tier of my desk, a sculpture of the flukeman by Randy Bowen, I thought it would be great to do. But I didn’t just want to recreate what I saw, as I’ve done with the other Hollywood inks. So in this case, I really only used it as a reference to get the major points right, and otherwise created what I thought the flukeman should be.
So here it is, as always let me know what you think. F is for Flukeman:
2 Comments
Isaac · November 21, 2011 at 6:12 pm
I like it! I’m glad that someone drew the flukeman for this week. (He was what I had originally planned to draw, until I realized I wanted to get something from Futurama into my alphabet.)
I actually think he looks a little more human there in your drawing than he did under all those makeup prostheses in the show. I was reading about that costume the other day, and apparently the guy wearing it basically had no option but to slither clumsily, because it was so constricting.
admin · November 21, 2011 at 6:26 pm
Thanks! I’d been going back and forth between the faun from Pan’s Labyrinth and the flukeman, and I figured there would be a lot of fauns (there were). It’s one of the episodes I’ve always remembered (along with the Tooms and hillbillies episodes), and I’ve been wanting to try an ink of it for some time. I do remember reading that too, that the costume was difficult to deal with. But he and the costume were quite effective, it was very memorable.
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