Egbert Van Heemskerck The Elder





















A Dutch painter from the Baroque era, some of Heemskerck's more interesting work is in these prints of fantastical animals acting like people.



"Description: A barber-surgeons shop with anthropomorphic participants. Engraving, c. 1730, after E. van Heemskerk.
Lettering: A barbers shop a medley shews, of monsters, wigs, drawn-teeth and news. While one is shav'd another bleeds, a third the Grub Street Journal reads. The master full of whig and tory, talks politics and tells a story, and swears he is not such a sot, but that he knows full well, what's what."


"Description: Human figures with the faces of animals are crowded in a room and one figure standing by the open door is addressing the cat woman who is holding a glass. Engraving by William Henry Toms after E. Heemskerck.
Lettering: Alas poor whore, thou art fairly trap'd, Tho' by thy spark so sweetly lap'd, And for thy midnight vice and folly, Your fate is now to mill your dolly."

If anyone knows where I can find larger versions of the last two of these images, please let me know.

Jüri Arrak Picture Book

Someone has posted scans from a story book by one of my favorite Estonian artists, Jüri Arrak.
It's not in english but the pictures tell the story just fine.

More work by Arrak can be found here.

François Houtin
One of the best art blogs out there Giornale Nuovo, has posted a great article on François Houtin. There's over a dozen great scans from a recently released book of Houtin's incredible drawings of fantasy gardens.

Additional links to more of Houtin's artwork can be found here, here and here.


Many thanks to Bibliodyssey for the great find.

Giants from Cornish Folklore

Leonard Baskin





















I found this blue demon while browsing a gallery of illustrations by Leonard Baskin.

View more works here, here and here.
And a disturbing parade towards some dark destination.
...taken from here.

"The owl that calls upon the night speaks the unbeliever’s fright"

Omni - Monster!!! (Kaiju Utopia)

There's a lot of great pics of unusual creatures designed into very colorful toys on this blog. A bit of warning, this link will probably take several minutes to fully load due to the number of images in it, but it is worth it. It takes you to all the posts from the previous year and is a great collection of some very weird monster toys.

And on a related note, I'll be doing a week long post dedicated to monster toys sometime later this year.

Check this thing out.

Masterpieces of Frog Art
I stumbled across this weird gallery while looking for works by Christoph Jamnitzer. Frogs have been placed into reinterpretations of works by artists such as Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Breughel, Alfred Kubin, and many others. Having browsed through most of the pages I feel like I just stepped out of some weird drug induced nightmare.

And I found this page full of many bizarre images of frogs from Myth and Religion.

Bob Flynn
I found this great pic of a lava beast while browsing Bob's artblog "JINX THE MONKEY :: DRIP!" Looking further into his blog I noticed that Bob has a tendency to draw many oddball creatures. You can see more of his work at his official site here.

The above image was made for Roger Omar's "Elmonstruodecoloresnotieneboca, a book of childrens' dreams. " And as posted at the Drip blog, here's a link to a flickr gallery that hosts more of the artwork from this book.
I noticed that monster maestro "Martin Ontiveros" is on there.

Jiri Havlicek





















Here is what looks to be an etching by Czech artist Jiri Havlicek, dated 1971.