Engraved Victorian tentacle-horrors from Dan Hillier

Dan Hillier's Cthuloid drawings sport engraved Victorian gentlemen and ladies who are magically twisting into tentacled horrors. I just bought this one from the artist himself at a market stall in London's Brick Lane, and it's proudly hanging on my wall. I'm restraining myself (just barely) from buying more. Link

• [Anonymous]

  The engravings aren’t Dan’s work he’s just scanned them and made a collage in Photoshop. I’d like to see something original.

• [anthony]

  These are cool, but props must be given to Max Ernst, especially his book of surreal victorian engraving collages : “100 headless woman” or “A Week of Kindness” (circa 1920′s)

  http://www.spamula.net/blog/archives/000198.html

• [Machiavellism]

  I love the artwork and his online gallery is incredible! I’m going to London in April as part of a class trip, whats the location of his gallery there?

• [erindipity]

  I really dig this one. Strangely, it reminds me of some photos I took recently. Weird!

• [Beanolini]

  A quick question- is this print actually produced by engraving (i.e. printed from an engraved plate), or does the ‘engraving’ just refer to the source of the non-tentacled parts of the image?

  The term ‘engraving’ is sometimes used to cover a number of printing techniques other than true engraving- I was under the impression that most Victorian mass-market illustrations were etched rather than engraved (though I’d be delighted to be corrected if someone knows better).

• [Anonymous]

  this reminds me a lot of the art of claudia drake, who uses vintage drawings and engravings in collage.

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/claudiadrake/sets/72157600044479607/

• [Cory Doctorow]

  Machiavellism@4: I found him in a Sunday market stall in Brick Lane, not a gallery. You might email him the week you’re coming to find out where he’s setting up shop.

• [Ben]

  I’m pretty sure these images aren’t Dan’s “drawings” as much as they are collages/reworks of existing engravings. I recognize most of the elements from the Dover Pictoral Archives (as organized in some great-and-cheap paperbacks by Jim Harter).

  This is also the same source from which O’Reilly culls the animal images used for the covers of their books.

• [Anonymous]

  This reminds me of a William Gibson short story “The Belonging Kind”.

• [Moniker]

  Those are great! While I’ve been able to find the occasional Lovecraftian tentacle horror, I haven’t yet seen an artist try to represent the strange, non-euclidean monsters and objects that drive men mad by their mere interaction with our dimension. Maybe something like the Hounds of Tindalos?

  I picture here some strange chimera that is a cross between the creatures in Carpenter’s The Thing and those animations I’ve seen of quaternion fractals changing over time.

• [D3]

  This illustration goes wonderfully with a great Robyn Hitchcock song called “Victorian Squid” on the album “You and Oblivion”.

  If you don’t know Robyn, you should check him out!