Mme d'Aulnoy Illustration





















The above dragon infested lithograph is an illustration taken from a novel by Madame d'Aulnoy. "a French writer known for her fairy tales. When she termed her works contes de fée (fairy tales), she originated the term that is now generally used for the genre." - quote source.
A few additional (very small) examples of illustrations for her stories can be found here. I'm unaware of any details regarding the actual artist responsible for the artwork.

Above illustration found here.

Kurt Halbritter


Halbritter (1924-1978) was a German cartoonist, his fantasy book from 1975 "Plant And Animal World" features drawings of real world animals mixed with human features and bits of architecture as seen above.

There is a large collection of scans from this book featured on this site.
See more of the bizarre beasts from this book in this online gallery.

Jaroslaw Kukowski - Modliszki
A very strange painting found on Kukowski's website.

Mark Powell Update

Mark has updated his flickr gallery with dozens of new photographs showing his recent diorama sculptures. The scene of the odd creatures playing instruments is brilliant and the attention to detail in these is absolutely incredible.

Check out the new stuff here.

Taddeo di Bartolo - Hell (1396)


Most images found in this collection.

Dinos and Jake Chapman's Disasters Of War


Above is one of many miniatures inspired by Francisco de Goya's series of 83 prints "Disasters of War" from 1810-20. This is the most detailed photo I've been able to find from this series made in 1993. The rest can be seen below, in no great detail unfortunately. A slightly more detailed photo can be seen at the BBC website.
Also, one of these miniatures were turned into a life size work in 1997 titled "Great Deeds Against the Dead."



See more work by Dinos and Jake Chapman in this previous post.

Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922)

Haxan is a Swedish/Danish black and white silent film directed by Benjamin Christensen. The film is a bizarre documentary concerning the history of witchcraft, it does an incredible job emulating grotesque scenes of old witchcraft inspired woodcuts. Browse this gallery at Wikimedia to see some of the woodcuts this film was inspired by.

The film can be downloaded in its entirety from either Stage 6 or Archive.org.

Alebrijes!

"These strange-colored monsters or alebrijes were invented by Pedro Linares, who saw them in a dream when he was 30, and very sick.

While he lay in bed, unconscious, he dreamed of a strange and different place, rather like a forest with trees, animals, clouds, sky, rocks and other things, and where all the animals had turned into odd, unknown creatures.

He saw a donkey with butterfly wings, a rooster with an eagles head and others that all shouted the word, Alebrijes. The animals began to shout louder and louder, Alebrijes, Alebrijes, Alebrijes!

the sound was terrible and he wanted to get away. A man told him that it still wasn't time for him to be there and that he would have to start walking in order to find the exit. Later, he came across a narrow window, climbed through, and suddenly awoke.

When Pedro was able to get out of bed, he began to remember his dream and wanted his family and other people to see these animals. So, he took some paper and began to mold the figures he had seen; he then painted them like those he saw in his dream." - quote source

This online gallery titled "Beasts and Bones" has one of the better collections of Alebrije.

This flickr gallery has pictures from an Alebrije exhibit where they're shown on trophy mounts. They remind me of similar sculptures by Dr Seuss.

Wikipedia article on the Alebrije.
Here's a good article on the subject.
There's a few on display here.
And here's a few gigantic examples.

Many thanks to Kyuzalt for tipping me off to these fantastic sculptures.