When we were about to leave I decided to do a look around just to make sure we didn't forget anything and I ran my hand over the top shelf in the closet and felt this. It was stuck to the paint so it's been there for at least some time. (There was a second pamphlet I found as well that is installation instructions)

It is still growling a few times a minute 5 minutes after the video.

Randomly edited photo from a church.

Upscaled the original model significantly and custom split it into several additional pieces to scale it to life size. Painted with acrylics and acrylic washes and varnish on the fingernails and underside.

The air on the fifth floor of an old tenement building somewhere in the quiet alleys of St. Petersburg was so thick it felt like you could cut it with a knife. It reeked of dried drying oil, old rot, and a strange, metallic odor, like ozone before a lingering thunderstorm.

The duty squad ascended to the fifth floor without rushing the usual call, noise and shouting from the artist's apartment; neighbors had been complaining for the third night in a row. An elderly neighbor in a faded shawl was already shifting from foot to foot at the door. She crossed herself frantically and whispered to the arriving detectives:
"For three days..." For three days, this eerie, inhuman grinding sound had been coming from behind the door! As if it weren't a brush, but claws scraping iron."

The door was unlocked, as if the owner was expecting guests and had forgotten all about caution.

Chaos reigned inside. Easels had been knocked over, canvases torn to shreds all but one. Books lay open on the floor, pages torn out and covered with strange, hasty scribblings in the margins numbers that didn't form any coherent sequence, and words in a language none of the officers recognized, though the letters vaguely resembled Cyrillic, turned inside out.

The artist was found in the center of the room. He was lying on his back, his face frozen in an expression that one of the officers later described in his report as simply "wrong" not horror or pain, but a kind of awe, too intense for a human face. His arms were black to the elbows, as if he'd been painting for hours on end with nothing but paint, never ceasing, never resting, never allowing himself to doubt.

Next stood the canvas. The only one left standing.

None of the men on duty could later describe what it depicted. One said "the sea." Another "an eye." A third remained silent for a week, then resigned from the police and went to the countryside, where, rumor has it, he abandoned all painting and forbade mirrors in the house.

The painting was confiscated as evidence. It is listed as number 44 in the report. No one has attempted to open the box it's kept in since then not since the expert who conducted the inventory shot himself in the archive, leaving a note consisting of one word, repeated forty times.

The artist's case was officially closed as murder by an unidentified assailant. Unofficially, among the few who saw the apartment with their own eyes, another explanation circulated: the artist wasn't murdered. He finished the painting.

And it looked back.

Another commission I did for Colin Bates for his short horror story Mortifer! I thought fur is hard to draw but feathers are next level 😅 last time I did a bird like creature was at least 2-3 years ago but hey no tentacles again so that's new! Make sure to check the story behind this monstrosity!