Cthulhu Bust, Winged Lovecraft Statue

Lovecraft never drew it. He described it, in 1928, as a thing with an octopus head, a scaled and rubbery body, long narrow wings, and claws on all four limbs, and then refused to be any clearer than that on the grounds that the human mind was not built to hold the whole shape at once.

So every version of Cthulhu ever made is somebody’s reading of one paragraph. This is ours.

The face does the work

A mass of tentacles hanging from the lower half of the head, each one modelled individually, with the suckers cut in rather than printed on so they still read from across a room. Above them a heavy ridged brow and two eyes that are not looking at you and never were. That is the important part. This thing is not a monster with an appetite, it is something old and indifferent that has not noticed you yet.

The wings are the gamble

Up and open, membranes stretched between long finger bones, veined the whole way out. They are what makes the silhouette, they are the reason the piece has presence on a shelf, and they are also the reason it is slow to print and slow to clean up.

What it is like in the hand

Heavier through the shoulders than it looks, because the mass sits low and the wings are hollow. It stands square on a plain cylindrical plinth, deliberately undecorated, so nothing competes with the head.

Left unpainted

Bare bone-white, which is the honest way to show a sculpt this dense. Every wrinkle in the brow and every vein in the wing reads as shadow rather than as paint. A hand-finished version with a deep wash is coming.

The numbers

• Printed and finished by hand in Australia.
• WEIRDO 006. That number belongs to this design and will never be given to another.
• Height and wing span to be confirmed.

Looking after it

The wing tips are the thinnest part of the piece and the part that will break if it is going to. Lift it by the body, never by a wing, and give it a spot where a sleeve will not catch it. Dust with a soft dry brush, because a cloth will snag in the tentacles. Out of direct sun, because PLA softens around 60 degrees.

Ordering one now

Made to order. Order it and yours goes into the next batch, usually within a fortnight, and you are emailed when it goes on the bed and again when it ships. This one takes the longest of anything we make, so it may run to the far end of that.

Change your mind before it is printed and we refund it in full without asking why. After that you still have every right you have under Australian Consumer Law, which we cannot exclude and would not want to.