Winged Old One

Elder Thing (sculpt)
28 mm scale; 40 mm tall

They were not evil things of their kind. They were the men of another age and another order of being. ... Scientists to the last - what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn - whatever they had been, they were men!

Unlike many of H. P. Lovecraft's horrors, the Elder Things were not supernatural or truly malicious in any way.  They were aliens who traveled to earth in the Cambrian era, founding a strange civilization and bio-engineering the dreaded Shoggoths as their servants.  Though hinted at in various eldritch volumes of the past, their existence was only truly discovered by Antarctic explorers from Miskatonic University in the 1930s, precipitating the loss of most of the expedition.

This strange creature from "At the Mountains of Madness" started out as an oval bead from my daughter's necklace kit.  I'd painted Lovecraft mythos figures before, but the Elder Things never caught my interest simply because ATMOM is, frankly, not a very accessible novel.  My sculpt isn't overly original, largely based on various Deviantart pieces as well as Lovecraft's oblique text description.  Most people's interpretations look something like these:

Stay away from the brown acid.

I imagined the tentacles, legs and wings to be boneless fluid-filled structures and sculpted them accordingly.  I don't think the "hands" and wings turned out particularly well, but overall I'm happy with it.  I gave it a tool or weapon (Laser gun?  Musical instrument?  Elder drain unblocker?) because they were supposed to be a highly advanced civilization, not just tentacle-waving animals.