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:
