A Clawed Beast's Glowing Eye Fills the Frame — Print & Oil Painting

The camera is on the floor, close enough to be within reach, and the composition works as a set of pincers: two clawed limbs come down the left edge, two more down the right, and the head hangs in the gap between them.

The claws are the best-drawn thing here. Segmented plates in dark teal, chalky at the joints, each ending in a curved hook of bone with a dull sheen along its inner face. They are drawn to be understood rather than to be feared, which somehow makes them worse.

The head is a mottled dome of yellow-green, pitted and scabbed like a rind, and set into the underside of it is one eye as wide as the skull. Amber at the rim, molten orange at the core, with a dark speck of a pupil and a few tiny marks drifting in the iris, it is lit from within and throws no light on anything around it. Below it a fringe of short dark spines stands in for a mouth.

Behind everything is nothing but a wall of pale olive stone, flat and out of focus, with three small pebbles on the ground to fix the scale of the thing. Part of our Zelda collection. For the other end of this bestiary, see the skull-faced spider hanging in the dark.