Kraken (Sweet Squares #3)

© 2012 Sylvia Liu

I've always liked the old-fashioned look of wood-cut or lino-cut printing, and I've even tried my hand at doing some in the past (for example, of surf boards). For today's Sweet Square, I've made a sketch of a kraken in a block cut style.

Kraken are:

• Mythical sea monsters from Norway and Greenland, probably based on sightings of giant squid.

• Said to have played with their food and made self-portraits (scientists discovered fossils of a prehistoric giant octopus who arranged its prey into a sucker-like pattern and concluded that they were self-aware).

• The subject of an entertaining novel by China Mieville, Kraken. Mieville is known for dark, steampunk, dystopian fantasy/horror novels, but Kraken is a more straightforward fantasy that Mieville has described as a "dark comedy about a squid worshipping cult and the end of the world."

If you liked this post, you may also enjoy:

• Illustration Friday: Scattered (kraken fossils)
• Curious Octopus (Sweet Squares #2)
• Nautilus (Sweet Squares #1)