 Hello, my name is Kim Dias Holm, or den Unge Holm, and welcome to the free art show because art should be free. Free to use, free to download, free to change and to modify and make your own. Free to tattoo and even free to sell. So all the art... I drew a bat because your bats are cool. And both of these are nice warm-up sketches. And that's one of the great things about drawing a request is I always want to draw a bat or a dolphin, but I seldom draw a bat or a dolphin, and getting it as a request is a great excuse to draw it. Then we drew the Dias main image, which was the Norwegian nautical spirit or spectre called Drogen in his half boat fishing for souls at sea. So it has some of the folklore of Drogen, who is a sort of the spirit of those dead at sea. It might even have some echoes of the goddess or the Juten Iran who is fishing for souls in Norse mythology. And yeah, that was the main piece. But after we had done those pieces, I still had time for one more. And that was a request from, I think it was from our very own non-crazy crazy cat lady on TikTok, who asked me to draw witches dancing around the fire, and we came up with that one. So today I will be starting with something that is sort of a monster and sort of maybe monstrous, but probably not. The thing about my daily ink monsters is that a monster is a really wide definition. And some of my monsters are silly, some of them are just made up, some of them are based on folklore or mythology, and some of them are gods or heroes. And you may say, but gods are not monsters, heroes are not monsters. But that's only true if you are in the culture that worships those gods or heroes. One culture's gods is, in many instances, another culture's demons. One culture's heroes are very often another culture's, again monsters or villains. So that's the whole idea. So today I will draw, as my daily ink monster, it's a bit of a stretch, it's a bit of a weird one. But hopefully the art will be good. I will be drawing the Faravahar from Iranian mythology, from Suruvastrian mythology. And the Faravahar is a symbol of secular Iran these days. So I thought it was fitting to actually get to draw it and to talk a little bit about its history. Okay, so you have maybe seen me end some of my drawings with this circle, which is called an Enso, which I've taken from Zen Buddhist painting. But I usually do that circle at the end of a drawing in order to see if the fates or gods approve of the drawing, if the drawing has a spiritual theme. But with this one I have to start by doing the Enso, the circle, the circle of life you can call it. And if we manage to do it, then we are good to go for today's drawing. Let's try. Focus on breathing, relax, feel the brush, feel the paper, feel the circle. And draw. That's good enough. So with the circle of life done, we'll start adding the other symbols to it. And the Faravahar is originally an even older symbol than Suruvastrianism. It might be originally portraying the Assyrian god Ashur riding in his sort of a sky chariot or something like that. And then in Akameinid times it was used as a royal symbol on the Akameinid palaces. And it's on the tomb of Darius the Great and probably some other places. It's in Persepolis. It's a lot of places to be found in the royal symbology of the Akameinid Empire. And then after the Akameinid Empire, the symbol sort of vanishes for a while. And then it is rediscovered and taken into modern Suruvastrianism in modern times in the 19th and 20th century. And that's where it gets its modern symbology. And we don't know how much of those symbols were associated with the old Suruvastrian symbol. Maybe everything, maybe nothing. We simply do not know. But the modern interpretation is that the circle here, that is something like the circle of life. That's not unexpected. Circles are often circles of life. Then there is a man in this circle which might be, it might be the royal spirit of old Suruvastrianism. The royal blessing, the royal glory. But in modern times it is interpreted as an old man symbolizing wisdom, the wisdom of ages. Hello to everyone in Dritat. And I'm going to draw him like I remember him from my interpretation of as I think he looks in the Akameinid stone reliefs. But it's again my interpretation. I see that there's a question in the chat about tagging my indigenous inspired art. And I do have some indigenous inspired art from different places. And on my website, on the ungehadhorum.smagmag.com where you can find all my art for free download. You can also search tags. But I don't think I have an indigenous tag. So that is probably, maybe that's something for the future. Now, the modern interpretation of the Phara Vahad's hands is that one of the hands are pointing forwards and up. And the other hand is holding a ring of promise or ring of, can even be a ring of marriage. But again, we don't know how much of these symbols are, how much of those interpretations are. Pure modern interventions and how much actually has some link to whatever the old customs were. The wings, which I'm starting here, have, I'm going to try to make the feathers come more alive. The rings have, they have this arm here. And then they have three rows of feathers. And in modern Soroastrianism, some interpret that as the pre tenets of Soroastrianism. Which is to quote and tuned to ride, shoot straight and speak the truth. Or good deeds, good words, or good thoughts, good words, good deeds, I think. I don't remember the, I don't really remember the, the, which, which comes first. Like those, do good deeds, say good things, think good thoughts, yes, that's the gist of it. Or as Santum says, to ride, shoot straight and speak the truth. Which is based on the old Achaemenid interpretations of these Soroastrian virtues. Now from the ring here comes two, these two thingy mobs. And one of them, the forwards one, represents I think good things and good thoughts and the backwards one bad thoughts. The same with the feathers underneath. Again in modern interpretations, represent bad thoughts, bad deeds and bad words. Cyrus the Great, yes, so we don't really know if Cyrus the Great was Soroastrian. We can assume because Darius was certainly Soroastrian. There, there are no Faravahad symbols in Persian culture from, that are definitely from Cyrus's time. But from Darius the Great's time, we do have a lot of these Faravahad. So that's it. Yeah, I think, I think this one is done. So we will number it number one, one, four. I need to figure out which number it is because I subtract of them all the time. So yesterday was the Gaul and that was 42. And this is the Faravahad, which is, so to ride, to shoot, to speak the truth. And there are other interesting things about the Faravahad and Soroastrianism. And like they have this, the royal glory, which is sort of their version of the mandate of heaven from Chinese mythology. Which is the power which Ahura Masta invests in the kings. And there's also this other spirit, which I don't, I think it's called the divine glory or something like that. Which is more acting similarly in some ways to the Holy Spirit in Christian mythology. And there was a comment here saying that Sansei Cyrus was the foreshadowing of Jesus, biblically speaking. I think you've got that a little bit wrong. And so in the Old Testament, there are a few instances where the text calls someone a messiah. That's a saviour of the Jewish people. And Jesus, of course, is in Christian mythology a messiah or the final messiah. At least until the second coming of the semi-final messiah, you'd think. But Cyrus is great because of his role in freeing the enslaved Jewish population of Babylon and restoring the temple of Jerusalem. As far as I know, I might be getting this wrong. As far as I know, he is the only non-Jewish person called a messiah in the Old Testament. So that's sort of the link. It's not a foreshadowing of Jesus, it's just the one in the line of messiah characters. So that was our first request and our ink monster for the day. And whether the Farabahad means the divine spirit or it is simply a symbol of Iran, of secular Iran as it's used today. Or it is a symbol of Soroastrianism in how I interpret the idea of making ink monsters, it fits beautifully in. Even though I'm not trying to say that this symbol is monstrous, but to some it will always be. Okay, so that was our first drawing. Let's try one more. And this time I'm going to try to go a little bigger. And I don't know if I'm going to make this or if I'm just going to be talking about it. But I got some very sad news on the way here. I read on Kim Yong-gi's official Instagram that Kim Yong-gi passed away instead. And if you don't know Kim Yong-gi, he was an absolutely brilliant artist. And he was one of the few other artists I knew of that used a pencil color brush. I've been using the pencil color brush since 1997, 1998, somewhere there. And it's been very good to me and it's been a crucial part of how I learned to draw with a brush and draw directly with ink. So in honor of Kim Yong-gi, I thought I would do the whole of today's live with the pencil color brush. So as far as I know, there are not all that many artists using this brush. The first, I started using it in 1998, 1997, somewhere around there. Then a few years later, I learned that Yuji Shinkawa of Metal Gear Solid fame uses it. And then I actually met Stan Sakai, who makes Usagi Yu-jimbo at a comic book festival. And I showed him this brush and he asked me about it. And a few years later, I was told that he used this brush. So maybe I got Stan Sakai to use it. And now, a few years ago, I discovered the amazingly gifted, skillful artist Kim Yong-gi. If you think, I'm good with ink, you should definitely see Kim Yong-gi. Very different style. The way he controls his brush, the way he makes his figures come to life, the way he shapes his images. It is breathtaking. It is unimaginably good. So yeah, I thought I'd try as best as I can to channel a little bit of Kim Yong-gi. If I can, I hope I may do him justice. Okay, so that us, he always often started way up in some random place on the page. And I would try to just do that. And what made Kim Yong-gi's work so special was how he shaped his finger mobs, his figures. And the accuracy and detail of his visual library. You know, I don't have such a large visual library as he did in my head. But it was really inspiring to see his work. I only saw it on YouTube and Instagram and stuff like that. It was extremely inspirational and I will take the time to... I've always said to myself that I should take the time and swipe more of his techniques. And I think now is the time. Now is definitely the time. Now I've been getting some questions on both on YouTube and TikTok. And I missed one of the questions on YouTube. And that was, did you go to school for mythology and art or self-taught? So both for art and mythology, I'm mainly self-taught. For mythology, I'm all self-taught. I'm a high school dropout. So my highest education is junior high school. I did go to one year of a sort of a pre-academy art school. But I used the time to party and be a fool. So I'm not time well spent to say put it like that. And for mythology, I've always just been really interested in mythology. And also, for instance, when I talked about the Faravahar now, that comes from having an interest in the Achaemenid Empire for a long time. And also reading up recently a few books about ancient Iranian mythology. I have about three books on that subject. I also have a book on a couple of books on the Achaemenid Empire, including one with a lot of translations of the clay library that was found in the burned remains of Persepolis, which is, unfortunately, it is mostly business transactions and stuff like that in the burned clay library, but it still has some interesting tidbits about the Achaemenid Empire. And these are books that I've read to various degrees. I haven't read every book from finish to end, and I always pay more attention to some parts and less attention to other parts. And then before, I knew I was going to draw the Faravahar. So before this live stream on the way here, I actually listened to a couple of YouTube videos about the Faravahar and also read the Wikipedia article. So Wikipedia is not necessarily a good source to use by itself, but it's a great source to verify things you know and sort of remember, but have sort of forgotten. And it is really hard to keep track of all this information because my mind was never meant for storing information. My mind is very much an artist's mind, and it is very much meant for making up shit as I go along. And that's my main strength is making shit up, always. And it's very hard for me to store information without adding to it. So I use Wikipedia a lot, especially right before I'm making a video or something, then I use Wikipedia quite a lot. Just a double-check facts and two. What I'm doing now is I'm trying to work in a way where I'm more than just reacting to ink blots and improvising the art from these random blots. I'm trying to do things in a more Kim Young-ie sort of way and to just begin one place and then add slowly to the image and hopefully make it all appear as one by the end. And I don't know if this might be a complete failure because I have never sat down on live with this approach in mind and improvised an image. This is the first time World Premiere. And I notice I have to pay attention to the YouTube because sometimes the camera will sort of drift a little bit. And if it continues to drift, the YouTubers will only see my jars of water, which I'm not using. I'm not using them because I'm using the pencil color brush and you don't need to dip that in water. Probably can, but I don't see what the point would be. What would be the point? I don't know. So the idea that I'm working on now is one of the requests I got was from a Danish sci-fi convention. I don't know if it was officially for that convention or it was from someone associated with it who thought, oh, that's a good idea, but they asked me to draw a gateway to another world. And I thought that maybe I would draw a dimensional portal, a dimensional portal from a Cthulhuoid dimension, but seen from the other side. So that is the general idea. A gateway to another world. So a brain. Yes, a brain, a brain. Ooh, maybe. What do you use in your hand? It's the pencil color brush. And I'm noticing that when taking this approach to the art, first of all, it is a lot slower than my usual ink art is, so excuse me for that. And also, it's a lot more nervous. And I will loosen up in a while, I hope. But slower nervous is the way to go. Pentel color brush is the brush, yes. So you get these, you can order them online or in good art stores all over the world. They will have them. And I really like working with them. I've worked with Pentel color brushes for 24 years, I guess. I do use a lot of other brushes as well, but the Pentel color brush has a very special place in my heart because it was so crucial for me in learning how to work with a brush. Good art stores only. You may find them in bad art stores as well. You may find a lot of things, a lot of places. But I would recommend trying to go to a good art store. If you don't have any good art stores, then go to the art stores that you have. Support your local art store, if you can. So there's a question here on the TikTok. Does my brush have a name on it? And I don't know quite what the commenter means. Maybe they mean to ask if my brush has an individual name, like if it's named Claire or Louise or Archibald. And the answer is no, because that would be sadistic. Because I, with my brush techniques, kill so many of these brushes that it would be absolutely sadistic to give them individual names. I know it doesn't have a name on it. No name on this brush. Hello there, Joy. I absolutely can't draw with those yet. And that's a very usual thing to say about a pencil color brush or about any brush at all, or about especially brushes with this type of Chinese or Japanese tip, which goes from very thick to very thin. And it's very common to be afraid of those and say, I can't draw with them. Other people can draw with them. I can't. But I would actually say that this brush is a very good beginner's brush. It's not an easy beginner's brush, but it's a very good beginner's brush. Because you can learn a lot by just jumping in and playing around with it and trying to master the thin strokes and the thick strokes. I'm doing all the precision work that I'm doing here, like this, and also doing the thick and nasty lines. My brush's name is no name. My brush's name is nobody. I named my brush after Odysseus in the Odyssey. I can take a little break from this and just show one of the main ways of learning how to use a brush is to learn how to do straight lines. To do straight lines going from thin to thick, from thick to thin, thin all the way through and thick all the way through. Practicing those lines hundreds and thousands of times, that's one of the things you do in order to master the brush. You get some mastery in the brush. When I'm talking about mastering the brush, saying that I have the brush figured out, saying that that's how you develop a mastery in it and with art, the mastery is something you work on all through your life. It's not something you're done with. So that is important to know. Now, if you are enjoying watching this, whether you're watching it live or on the YouTube replay, please do share it. Do spread it around and make a little tweet about it or repost it or just show it to a friend of you who you think might enjoy it, because getting word of mouth and organic spreading of my videos is the most important way of slowly getting more traction and slowly getting more followers and more eyes on the art, which will help with getting me to a place where I can use even more time on the free art, on the art for free use. Hello to the new viewers. Now, as you're noticing, if you have questions, it's perfectly possible to ask the questions while I'm drawing on the live. That is not only permitted, but it is encouraged. That's one of the fun things by going live like this, is to try to manage to keep focus while people are asking things that are completely irrelevant or relevant. You can go with relevant as well. So if you have questions, then please do share. I guess that's fun. So if you're watching this, please do share the stream. There's a lot of things going on with this work that is potentially very might mess up. For instance, defining the dark spaces behind the tentacles is a potential place where it's easy to mess up. Now, around an hour left to finish this one piece, and I've worked on it for how long have I worked on it for? Probably about 20 minutes. And if this is 20 minutes, and I have three times that time left, then I actually need to start thinking of ways to hasten the progress. If I'm going to finish in 45 minutes, I need to figure out ways to make the process go quicker. At this moment, it's making me think of Cthulhu pretending to be Santa up and down the chimney. Oh, it does look like a chimney. It does look like a chimney. That is awful. That is not the idea at all. We need to do some things with it to make it less chimney-like. It's not supposed to be a chimney. So, just a few little remnants here. Let's do a little twisted tree-shaped thing here. Any idea about that empty wallet body? This is a commenter who keeps asking me about drawing an empty wallet. And I have no ideas about empty wallets. That's not something I consider in my art style. But the free art show would be a perfect place to actually sit down and do the planning and thinking that would be required to draw an empty wallet and to make that cool somehow. And am I going to do it? I don't know, but if I was going to do it, then here would be the place. So, maybe I'll draw your empty wallet at some other free art show. But today, definitely not. But keep with your... Maybe your persistence will be rewarded in the end. Okay, behind... Let's get through here. I need to do some sort of shapes. Maybe signifying some sort of old, ancient city, something like that, something in the background. I'm going to start working more towards my regular messy style less towards the line work style. If you're watching this on TikTok, then do keep tapping the hearts and tapping the screen to give hearts, to give more likes, to stream to get a few more people into the chat. So, same if you're watching on YouTube. I don't know how you do that on YouTube, but keep commenting and asking questions and keep the live vital. I'm going to have to quicken parts of this. YouTube can only give one like. Oh, no, but you can give many comments. I'm trying to watch the comments on YouTube as well, but it is harder to watch them the way my camera is set up. So, what I'm noticing here is that I have to go between these sort of fast and loose brush strokes and the thinner lines that I started with in order to make it go quickly enough. Actually, at this point, I'm thinking that maybe it won't go quickly enough. Maybe this will not be finished on this here live. Oh, no! That would be a disaster. People would be rioting in the streets saying, Kim, Kim, why didn't you finish your Cthulhu Christmas picture? It's not a Cthulhu Christmas picture. That's a cool brush. Can you drop the bean's name? I'm guessing you're asking for a brush's name, which we've talked about quite a few times on this show so far, but we can repeat it. It is a pentel color brush, and it's a magnificent little brush with ink cartridge, so you don't have to dip it. It's really good if you need to take your brush with you to work outside, or I use these when I go to black metal concerts live. This is the brush I use, or the type of brush I use. Good black underneath here. Again, to hasten the process to quicken it. So, new question. Hey, you're a very good artist. Thank you. Have you ever wanted to do digital? I did work digitally for years, in fact. And I loved working digitally, but once I switched back to working non-digitally, working with brushes again, I really haven't looked back. I haven't missed doing digital work in any way. What's your opinion on Sweden? Since I'm Norwegian, I guess I'm supposed to have a spicy opinion on Sweden. But I don't. I've only been to Sweden, I think once, to the Sweden Rock Festival to see Entombed and Judas Priest, among others. I saw TNT, Halloween. It was fun. That was great. I loved that. And Sweden has a lot of good metal, a lot of good music. It's the home of greats, such as Cornelis Vröschvik. A lot of good metal, as I said, entombed, batain, ghost. So much great music. Abba! So much great music from Sweden. I think Swedish is, in some regards, a much more of a poetic language than Norwegian. Than Bukmål's Norwegian, at least. I mean, the dialect in Norwegian is a lot more poetic than the writing language of Norwegian, which is notoriously hard to do poetry in. Another question is, are you an HP Lovecraft fan? Does it look like I'm an HP Lovecraft fan? Yes, of course. Lovecraft is definitely... He's actually my favourite writer. He is one of the few things in the world that I have actual expertise on. So for instance, when I'm talking about mythology or the Achaemenid Empire or politics or anything like that, I am very much talking out of my arse. I have a very broad knowledge but very little real in-depth knowledge. In-depth knowledge on a few small places but mostly very broad knowledge. While on Lovecraft, I would actually say that I have some expertise. So, with expertise, I mean that I have read all of Lovecraft's writings including all of his ghost-written stuff, his childhood stuff that's published, his poetry, a lot of his essays and articles. I've also read most of the biographies about him including some of the obscure ones. I've also read a ton of Lovecraft academia articles about interpreting aspects of his work, about the problems of his work, about the problems of his scholarship around him, about the problems and the history of the fandom around him. So, there was a question here in Norwegian but I'm going to translate it. Can you order specific subjects? Yes, that's exactly what the Free Art Show is for. It is for requesting specific things like this one which is someone requested a portal to another dimension or to another world. And this is my interpretation of that. And you can be more specific or you can be less specific. What you can't do on the Free Art Show is to do commission requests. So, if you ask me can you draw a portrait of my mother-in-law then the answer is no. Because I hate your mother-in-law. No, that's not the reason. The answer is no because I can only draw things that I will be putting out for free use. That's the whole idea of what I'm doing here. These pieces will be released for free use as soon as they are scanned. They will be uploaded to the Free Art Show gallery. I also have a ton of other galleries with works for free use. And you don't want your mother-in-law put up for free use. That sounded awful. Are you able to live off your art alone? Yes, if you, by that mean able to live off my art alone like most artists are, then yes, with a combination of art and some sales, some commissions, some teaching classes then yes, I have been able to make a very meager living for many years now. But the last year I've been pushing my Patreon more and more and we've gotten up to about $2,000 a month on Patreon which is starting to look like a Norwegian salary is still not quite at the level it needs to be but it's getting closer. That has allowed me to hire my assistant Echo for two days a week in order to get a little bit more done. But if you want to support me to get even more done and even more free art out there for free use, then please do consider supporting on Patreon. Now we have about 40 minutes left. Can we finish this piece? Which story from Lovecraft do you think is best? So that sort of depends on what you are after and what mood you're in. So if you are looking for a story that's a good... Lovecraft didn't really do trilling. He wasn't a horror writer in the traditional sense. He didn't try to create trilling action filled stories. That's not what he did. He wasn't a Stephen King. Not that there's anything wrong with that but it was a very different genre. He did art for art's sake. But if you want a story that is both good to read and is a good representation of what made his style of horror special, then the shadow over in Smouth is brilliant. It is really creepy. It is really weird and special and it's also got action scenes. It's one of the only Lovecraft stories that has something resembling an action scene. And that's kind of fun. If you want the best sort of pure Lovecraft, if you want to experience what Lovecraft was trying to do with his art in the purest sense, then I would agree with Lovecraft's own estimation of his best work. And that is the color out of space. The color out of space is really just an incredibly oppressive mood piece. And that's what he was trying to create. Instead of having a structure where you have this sort of a drama curve with crills and chills and breaks in between and action and romance and all that stuff, he was trying to build stories where you had a singular oppressive mood and just built that one mood from the beginning to the end without stop. That's the sort of the ultimate Lovecraft story or what he was trying to do. And there's other things involved like he was trying to explain the unamable and to use his adjectives in order to paint pictures that are impossible to visualize to comprehend. And his best attempt on doing all of that, on doing the scientific realism, on doing getting the humanity in it, on getting the dream-like or nightmare-like logic in it. On all of those points, there's one story that does it better than anything else and that is the color out of space. And that is just a magnificent story. It's very oppressive. It is kind of hard to read but it is also very, it is chilly. And it is disturbing in good ways. Mountains of Madness was my favorite so far. Mountains of Madness is his only sort of almost a novel of, so his longest work of those that were published in some shape or form when he was alive even though it was cut to pieces and edited beyond recognition and that was a sore disappointment for him. But the, you know, it is the longest story we have from him which we considered a truly a finished story. That and the shadow out of time. But the color, I don't know, at the Mountains of Madness is it is a harder read than both color out of space and shadow over in its mouth because it is so long and it has these very long passages that are incredibly dense and a bit hard to read. I do enjoy it. I think it's great and it's really interesting in how it builds this back story of forgotten civilization, lost civilizations and man's insignificance in the cosmos and it has all of those themes which are not present in the same way in color out of space or shadow over in its mouth. So it's very much recommended in that respect. But in that respect I would personally prefer the shadow out of time. I think that shadow out of time to my taste flows better as a story and it is in some sense Lovecraft's most hopeful story because it is a story where humanity at least has a little bit of place, a little bit of purpose which isn't the usual fear for Lovecraft. And it was one of his last stories. So it's interesting to see how he changed outlook on a few things during his last years and it would have been interesting to see how he had evolved if he had survived to see World War II to see the hippie movement or all of those things. He was a terribly conservative and racist and very problematic character even in his time. But it would have been interesting to see how he would have seen all the changes to society because he was also so opposed to the society he was born into he always felt like he was born out of time so that would have been interesting to see that would have definitely been interesting to see. Are you planning to add red ink or other colours to this piece? I will not have time to do that I'm actually wondering if I should scan this piece I will scan this piece of course to make it available for free use but maybe to scan this piece and colour it digitally. That would be the first time in a very long while I can't even remember the last piece I coloured digitally. That must have been years ago now. We are sort of running out of time with this one we have probably around half an hour left. That would be interesting to see. Would you be live steering that too? I don't know if I would. That depends sort of on if I can make the setup for that easy enough. My son loves deep sea creatures and I would love to have access to this one You will get access to it once it's scanned it will be uploaded to the gallery for free use and there are a lot of other Cthulhu and deep sea things around in my gallery available for free use. So definitely check that out. I'm noticing that I'm rushing things a little bit in order to get finished with this one. I think I will have to do this one in two parts and probably to colour it digitally as well and to do some sort of mix between digital and traditional art but I will finish this part of the piece. Do you know the story The Black Stone by Robert E. Howard? Yes I've read quite a bit of Robert E. Howard I find his style very fun very easy to read. I'm no expert on Howard so I don't know. I can't really read it that in detail. I know I've read the story. I don't remember any of the details so sorry about that but I know that I did read it because I think it's is it in one of the collections of like tales of Cthulhu Midos I think it is. If I'm not mistaking it with another story So have you ever done a piece of Asatoth? Yes I have and I posted it on the tiktok. If you scroll back probably a month or so you can find the piece it's in my Daily Ink Monster Gallery as well I think I reposted the Asatoth video this month or not this month but last month September I think. So yes it was in one of the collections with other stories from Lovecraft. Yes that's where I have The Black Stone from. It didn't leave an impression on me when I read it the things I've read most of them Howard's work is The Conan Stories which are really as you know pulpy shlucky fantasy they are great fun. Again very problematic character. I mean you can read Lovecraft and Howard's letters to each other where they are spent on their racial theories which is completely awful reading Howard is deep into loads of things that would become like ancient aliens conspiracy theory that type of theories about the origins of races and stuff like that which is Lovecraft is equally racist but a little bit more scientifically grounded not in his racism but in his skepticism towards a lot of those more out there theories but it is interesting to read the letters between the two of them if you can stomach that amount of intense racism on a paper it is do you find that an author's problematic views decrease your enjoyment of their work? Yeah of course of course but in the case of Lovecraft for instance you also have to or you don't have to but you can also look at it like there are themes in Lovecraft about what he's writing about is fear he's writing about the nature of fear trying to explore why we as humans are afraid and it makes sense that his life would be ruled by fear not only the fear of people different than him which would be you know I mean xenophobia would be one of them but also the fear of poor uneducated educated people the fear of other cultures the fear of not just black people but Jews and I mean he had problems with Norwegians there was time in Lovecraft's life when he sort of took in a Norwegian kid to as his apprentice thing or something to learn him some culture and stuff like that and he ended up very disappointed about how the Norwegian kid turned out to just be a Norwegian after all even you know any one who didn't live up to his standards of Anglo-Saxon upper class highly uneducated he had really huge problems with this was one aspect of his fear he had fear of nightmares he had fear of the sea fear of fish fear of cold he had so many fears and he had fear of success he sabotaged his chances at success again and again and you know that writer who is so ruled by fear should choose to investigate fear as deeply as he does in his work is sort of perfect it adds to his work the fact that he was really afraid of I mean afraid of everything of society of modernity of people and I'm not trying to blow it out of the water because he was also you know he was a social person he was a well articulated person he was in some ways he was accomplished but he was also extremely ruled by fear and that is very fitting for a writer that tends his career his life trying to delve into the nature of fear which makes him in some senses a very bad person especially if you were not Anglo-Saxon like him although he did have Jewish friends he had Bohemian friends he had a wide variety of different friends but he wasn't what we today would call a nice person because of his views which were even for his time extremely racist unusually racist even for his time but it does make sense that such a person would write great things about the nature of fear but yes it does decrease when you read the Lovecraft stories where the racism is just full on in the stories it is hard to read and you know if you don't want to read it because of that that is your choice because there are so many other great authors to read there's no single author that you have to read and even if you're interested in horror then you can completely skip Lovecraft because of his racism and still find probably do a lot of the same things as he did because it is extremely these are extremely common themes in natural themes for anyone that are coming to horror from a humanist perspective from a non-religious perspective from a scientific perspective also from the perspective of working or discovering exploring the nature of fear if you're doing those things then likelihood is that you will be exploring some of the same themes and going over some of the same ideas that Lovecraft did but in your own way and that way may not be as fucking racist as this was and also it is completely okay to be inspired by Lovecraft if you manage to find a way to deal with the problematic sides and not to make this excuse for why you should like Lovecraft but you know my favourite metal band named after a Lovecraft story is Living Colour because Vernon Reed the guitarist of Living Colour is a huge Lovecraft fan and thought and as a black man thought that it was a very ironic thing that a person so racist as Lovecraft would write a story where an unknown colour was the monster and that's why he named his band Living Colour that's why colour is written O and U just as Lovecraft would write it. That's one of my favourite Lovecraft trivia because that is funny and I do very much enjoy Living Colour's music and you do find in a couple of Vernon Reed's lyrics even though he never does horror or stuff like that he deals with themes of being an outsider in a way that is very much inspired by some of the things Lovecraft did. He just writes a bit better riffs than Lovecraft Lovecraft was notoriously unmusical. He once said something to the effect that I didn't really like music but you know once in a while it would be a good marching band playing like Vienna Waltz or something like that so that's not really a musical mind which is interesting because you could argue that a story there's another story which is a great story for a beginner Lovecraft fan the music of Ericsson, Ericsson that is a fantastically moody nightmare piece and one of the best written early stories definitely. And that is about music and it is in some ways sort of foreshadowing the advent of noise music and you know his Lovecraft descriptions of Acetoth with the piping of cosmic flutes and the thumping rhythm that is very reminiscent of music that didn't exist in Lovecraft's times. And I find that very interesting. Say with one of his one of my favourite stories but also a very problematic and racist story is he which is a homerotic sort of walk through New York through the old streets of New York where the character is led by this unnamed or unamable or weird attraction to this stranger he meets that leads him through impossibly old streets of New York. And then in the end shows the narrator some sort of portal to another time where in each flash of lightning the narrator gets to see first a distant past with unspeakable rituals from the natives of the land and then the coming of the Europeans and the slaughter of the indigenous people and then the final horror of that story is a vision of the future in which New York has become a skyscraper infested city and every person is yellow so this is the racist part of it and dancing to this cosmic horrible thumping cthulhuish music so it is very interesting in weird and problematic ways very problematic ways to be frank if you tried to not read any classic literature because of an author's problematic ideas we'd have none now there are some loads of authors that are less problematic to read and also there's tons of writers from from other cultures that we can read and there's tons of modern writing that is really good there's no lack of things to read but what we're talking about here is if you're reading Lovecraft you have to be aware that he is very directly without you know it's not in between the lines it's not insinuated he is dehumanizing a lot of people and that is hard to read especially if you're one of those people dehumanized by the writing and it's recent enough that it is you can't just say that he was a product of his time because most people of his time and this was a very racist time but most people of his time didn't care as much as he did but it is also interesting it is sort of natural that a person who writes about fear should be so ruled by fear and it is interesting to see what he does with it and what he can tell us about the nature of fear so now we are going to do a portal here maybe I can I think I will do it like this in order to actually manage to do this image finished I will go to Kirby dots Kirby dots are amazing I love Kirby dots everybody should work should Kirby Jack Kirby was a very weird and genius artist looks nice thank you some lines around like this some spaces where we don't need to put the Kirby dots we don't need to put the Kirby dots are you self-taught or did you study somewhere else I am mostly self-taught we have been through this a few times but yeah I don't have any proper education I am a high school drop out and I have always just been drawing and drawing and drawing that's if I had been able to go to school and had not been as traumatized by the school system as I was that would have been easier and I would probably learn more and done things quicker learn things quicker but I had to learn on my own because school was not for this kid not Kirby dots Kirby dots Jack Kirby Jack Kirby was the artist who created Marvel Steve Ditko did create things like Spider-Man and Doctor Strange there was a few other characters who created a few other artists who created a bit of Marvel but Jack Kirby was the one who created most of it Stanley was the one who took credit for it what you think you missed in your education from missing school I mean there's a lot of I don't really think I missed anything in my education that's not really what I'm saying what I'm more saying is that it would have been a if I could have spent like three years of high school and then five years of art Academy focusing on the art and getting to do life drawings and learning techniques and stuff like that would probably have been an easier path than what I did which was drawing continuously but also being a raging partier and and you know wallowing in my depressions and and also trying so much to learn how to make it as an artist and how to do all the techniques and how to do so it would have been an easier path but I don't know why I'm saying this because I'm guessing my point is mostly that if you can do school that probably you should how was it for you socially I mean school is where you get your first friends and learn connections so I was never the unpopular one in school I was more of a class clown so I did have friends I did fight a lot I was social I didn't really notice how much energy being social took out of me until after I quit school but just to give you a image or a sort of quick overview I had a lot of friends through elementary school and junior high school and I have stayed in touch with none of them not a single one because at the end of school I was so tired of the mold and of school and it wasn't their fault but it was school was traumatic and even now I notice the trauma I'm still affected by that trauma and I didn't start calling it trauma myself because I didn't experience things that I would think about as traumatic but the continued as a therapist explained to me one of the few good therapists I've ever had when you're continuously subjected to a hostile environment to your very being and school was hostile towards my being to my way of being me to how I presented to how I acted to how I to every inch of my every tiny inch of my being it was hostile to and being subjected to that for years is traumatic even though I had very few directly traumatic experiences and do you find it important to look at artists work when starting out yes of course you copy everyone copy copy copy copy everyone I still do that you know if I see an artist I like that I really get a kick out of if I have time and energy I will sit down and do a lot of exercises in figuring out how to copy them how to try to figure out how they do it how so if you're looking at an ink drawing figure out how they do their pencils if you're doing a painting figuring out how they do their layers and do they do it in how many sittings and figuring out how to do it and also to take the other approach to to figure out how to do it in your own style in your own approach and to take the characteristics of another artist and do it in your style in your own approach and all of those artists that you copy and that you play around with they become part of your style they leave little traces behind you can see a lot of Miller Frank Miller in my work you can see Jack Kirby you can see John Bushema you can see Hiraoka Samura you can see Guseki Kojima you can see Georgii Shinkawa Möbius you can see Sergio Aragonis you can see Don Martin you can see Christopher Nielsen Stefan Kvarenland you can see Kittelsen Erich Wadensson you can see so many Van Gogh you can see it's all there and it's all artists who I have at some point copied in order to try to figure out how they do their shit now I'm doing Kirby dots and this drawing doesn't look like Kirby it doesn't look like Kirby at all hopefully it looks like mine I can see some Glenbar in it I can see some Keith in it I can see some even some Kittelsen in it I can see a lot of me in it but there's always also these Kirby dots which are ripped from Kirby and from all the artists who ripped off Kirby and that's a concrete thing it is what it is as they say I took it from Kirby and I'm making it my own so that's what you gotta do copy copy copy copy and of course try to develop your own style but a lot of developing your own style is done through copying and you copy but you find your own mistakes and some of those mistakes you start treasuring and you start developing into your own language which is you know it is the sum of all the artists you copied and that essential thing that is you that attracted you to all those different artists your peculiar tastes shine through in all the art you copy and we talked a bit about Kim Yong Gi because he sadly passed away and how this piece was sort of my attempt on at least starting with a more Kim Yong Gi approach to my art and I've done a little bit of copying of Kim Yong Gi because I was very I found his stuff very inspirational once I discovered him a few years ago but I haven't really sat down and done the proper copying but I think that is definitely something I should do I should do soon because his art was awesome and I can learn more from him still so yeah I'm definitely going to sit down watch a few of the videos of him drawing magnificent stuff and then copy copy copy and try to learn as much as I can from him and so it's not just it's not just that it's not just something that you do when you're starting out and you're figuring your way as an artist it's also something you continue doing throughout your career through your life if you want to improve you copy copy copy copy and of course study and make things your own that goes without saying but copying is a vital part of that always I think we have to stop here I think this is actually good enough to be to call finished and then I will make another version of it which probably digitally inked and with maybe a photograph of our world in the portal and you know I this isn't a Kim Yong-gi style work but trying to at least begin by channeling a little bit of Kim Yong-gi definitely helped push this piece to become something different than a lot of what I've done lately and I think it came out really well I think it was a success oh and it was hard as fuck I think I've managed without swearing a single time but now we had to do it let's go here sorry let's give the people on tiktok a little closer look oh and the people on YouTube can see the tiktok okay now these pieces will be released for free use they will be uploaded to my gallery theongihadhorn.smugmug.com you can find the link in the bio or in the description on YouTube and please also head over to YouTube and subscribe there I definitely need more subscribers on YouTube I will not be abandoning tiktok I have 1.3 million followers there but I need to go over to a platform that is more stable and that allows for longer form content and it's more manageable and YouTube seems like the best alternative for that at the moment so that's where I'll be putting a lot of focus these coming months so go over to one of my longer form content and if you are on YouTube or tiktok and like my art and like the idea of art for free use if you want to support that then please head over to patreon.com.com you can find the link in the bio and support with one dollar a month one dollar a month is all that I ask for if enough of you do that then that will change my life it is already changing my life so thank you for that if you can't afford to support with one dollar a month then that's completely understandable you can also afford you can also support by we have to sign this I forgot to sign this and after we sign this we also have to add a few more dots because I never finished when I'm signing I always see something that needs a little bit more work always if you can't afford to support on patreon with one dollar a month then you can support by going to my gallery and downloading my art it's all available for free use under a creative commons attribution license which means you can download it you can copy it you can share it you can change it you can modify it you can make it your own you can tattoo it as hundreds of people have done already there are a handful of people who have opened their own web stores trying to sell my art and I appreciate that so much and I hope that more people will do that in the future as well I will be doing a video or video series about how to actually approach making money off my art because I see a lot of people just slapping my art on a t-shirt and hoping that will sell but it's not quite that easy you have to make it your own in some way in order to sell you have to make a good looking t-shirt a good looking product a special product that makes you feel like I want to buy this and not like this is just slapped on a random t-shirt so it takes a little bit more of design work a little bit more of thinking but I appreciate it so much that was a long little train of thought while I was really trying to end this live because I have to catch a bus Wooo! Kim remember to tell them to subscribe for a chance to get a postcard yes I've forgotten to talk about that as well so many things to forget but until October I will be drawing postcards like these every day of October I'm drawing a postcard and I'm writing on the back of it if you go to my Beacons page, link in bio you can subscribe to my newsletter and in a few days I will be sending out my very first newsletter with information on how to win one of these there's a bit of technical difficulties trying to make it work but I will make it work bear with me bear with me I think that is all for now we made the Farah Bahad so which is a secular it is a Soroastrian symbol, it is a historical symbol and it's also a secular symbol for Iran these days so if you see people sharing news about what's happening in Iran then do remember to share and amplify Iranian voices it's extremely important to get people to know what and care about what's happening in Iran today so we drew the Farah Bahad and we drew the Star Spawn of Cthulhu opening a gate to our dimension and impending doom coming our way and that was all we got for today thank you so much for watching and see you next week, bye bye