Drew Tucker

Drew Tucker on Men of Leng

“So, Men of Leng was a Lovecraft thing. So I was like, okay, I gotta read some Lovecraft.

And I know I’m not supposed to say this, but I really hate reading Lovecraft. I love what Lovecraft has spawned, but I’m not into his writing at all. So I bought the big volume, the really large volume and I did all this research and referencing and went down every little stupid rabbit hole I could. There were some references to them being Goatmen, and so I started off making some little models of them. In some of the more modern media, they’ve been represented as really grotesque, that's totally our modern aesthetic, but I don’t think I really do grotesque. So I took a different approach, with a little more emphasis on the goat aspect..

So I’m sketching them, and doing all these weird studies trying to work out early problems. Your sketches are the skeleton that provides the structure that holds the whole thing together - a lot of problems can be worked out in the drawings and that’s where I settled on this particular perspective.

I chose this view to engage the viewer, I want it to be like they are right there in the painting if that makes sense. I could have painted it like you were just there standing there and looking at them, but that’s not going to be very cool. But, what if you fell down? Or woke up and there’s these weird goat guys, like hovering above you? I like the idea of things hovering down over you, looking down.

When it came to painting them, I could have gone all classical and polished everything, but that doesn’t show the cracks, you know? I lot of times I let the picture guide itself, which maybe is a crazy thing to say, cause I know the sky is going to be softer and the guy in the back is going to have to drop off and stuff, but I just try to let the paint be paint. I want the emotional feeling of the strokes and colors, it’s obviously all paint, but I want to try and let things beyond words, or the paint, come through.”