Okay, so before you unsubscribe from my RSS feed citing blasphemy, know that I’m no devil worshiper. I promise you, I’m not here to offend anyone. As a design focus, you have to admit, this literary figure has an interesting illustrated past. I originally envisioned this sketch as a simple icon, a road sign that read devil crossing, with a simple silhouette of a human top and a goat bottom, but as I gathered the pieces for the figure, I realized that the detailed lines would come together very nicely as a more realistic illustration. To that end, I got some great free images from MorgueFile and Flickr’s The Commons, so that I’d not need to worry even about attribution. I got a picture of a goat’s head for the horns, a public domain portrait of a bare chested fighter, and a picture of a deer for its hind quarters, and brought them all into Inkscape and bitmap traced them. I had to do some flipping, node removal and resizing to get all of the elements right in relationship to each other, and after that I connected the disparate lines with the calligraphy tool. I had to rebuild the hooves on the deer, connect the hind quarters to the man’s chest, and place the horns, hat-like, upon his head. Finally, using the pencil tool set to 50% smoothing, Spiro, and shape: triangle in, I made 5 tails, and capped each tail with a point. All said and done, I wouldn’t want to meet up with this guy.
This content is published under the Attribution 3.0 Unported license.