“Daniel stared hard at the creature before him, this thing that looked human and sounded human but was not. There was a horrid shift in his consciousness; he saw this being like a great insect, a monstrous evil predator who had devoured a million human lives. And yet he loved this thing.” -The Queen of the Damned: The Story of Daniel, The Devil’s Minion
A more (less?) literal interpretation of Daniel’s thoughts about Armand and how he sees him. This was a very fun piece to draw and probably more my ‘style’ than anything I’ve drawn like all year! In hindsight I might have flipped the direction of the scorpion tail but yes, very fun! Pencils + Photoshop for coloring and editing.
“In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism, murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt, the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves, vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable.”
I knew that monsters were far more gentle and more desirable than the monsters living inside ‘nice people.’ Accepting that you are a monster gives you the leeway to not behave like one. When you deny being a monster, you behave like one.
Guillermo del Toro on why he loves monsters. (via lampfaced)
I-want-my-IWTV 