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John Meszaros

@johnjmeszaros

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Illustrator/writer. Loves astronomy, biology, paleontology, geology..
Spooky photos at: @magic_lantern_ghost
Book reviews at: @reading_radiodont

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I wrote another book! This is a collaboration with fellow artist Stanton Fink. I’ve always enjoyed his drawings of creatures inspired by mythology and paleontology and thought it would be fun to create backgrounds for some of them. So I wrote this little field guide to the Garden of Lost Ages, a botanical garden adjacent to the renowned Nautilus Hill Library. Inspired by my own love for field guides both real and fantastic.

Text by John Meszaros
Art by Stanton Fink (except for the map of the garden, which I did)

Get a copy here:
https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Fauna-Flora-Garden-Lost/dp/B0F6NVFR7Z/

#speculativefiction #speculativebiology #speculativebiologyart #creaturedesign #anomalocaris #ghostbook #writersofinstagram #artistsofınstagram #bookstagrammer #bookstagram #indiebooks #indiewriter #indieartists #paleoart #fieldguide by @johnjmeszaros

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a year ago

Made some ghost fish out of plywood scraps. These are going to be part of my SCUBA skeletons Halloween display.

#halloween #halloweendecorations #deepseacreatures #ghost #sealife by @johnjmeszaros

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14 days ago

I visited @acadnatsci last weekend to see it one last time before it closes permanently on September 30th. One of my favorite exhibits is the display of Hadrosaurus bones. This was the first semi-complete dinosaur skeleton to be scientifically studied in North America. The bones were found in a marl pit in Haddonfield, NJ in 1838, and eventually described by paleontologist Joseph Leidy.

Seeing Hadrosaurus again inspired me to draw this dinosaur ghost to kick off the Halloween season. The spectral body is based on the Hadrosaurus statue in Haddonfield that commemorates the discovery.

The Academy museum has been open to the public for almost 200 years and its sudden closure has devastated many Philadelphians and museum enthusiasts around the country. The fight to save the museum is still going. If you want to help, check out @savetheacademy

#dinosaur #halloween #ghost #savetheacademyofnaturalsciences #fossil by @johnjmeszaros

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20 days ago

Some more painted cutouts I made for my trolley museum’s Halloween festivities. Mothman and the Dover Demon (yeah, definitely the Dover Demon and not a Moomin). Also a little spooky guy I made from a piece of scrap wood.

#halloween #mothman #cryptid #spooky #halloweenprops by @johnjmeszaros

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a month ago

Another letter from Saturn!

My Jess,
Dr. Miura came up with a new way to name creatures over here: telling ghost stories! Or rather, “kaidan”, as she calls them.

See, we’ve been collecting specimens in the Turmeric Dunes these past few weeks and those infrasound vibrations the cymatics make have been giving everyone the creeps. You really need to hear them for yourself. It messes with your head. I keep thinking I’m seeing shadow people all over the place.

Anyway, Dr. Miura had the idea to take advantage of the creepiness and have ghost story- I mean kaidan- parties out in the dunes. We’ve done four so far and it’s been a big hit. At the end of the night we all vote on who told the best story and the winner gets to name some of species we’ve discovered that week.

Since Dr. Miura came up with the idea, we gave her the first naming honors. She told us a story from medieval Japan about the ghost of a servant woman named Okiku. One of the castle’s samurai lusted after her but she refused his advances. He hid one of the ten expensive plates she was in charge of caring for, and when Okiku couldn’t find the plate she panicked, knowing that losing it would mean severe punishment. The samurai offered to tell the castle lord that she was not the one who lost it, but only if she would accept his advances. Again she refused, and he flew into a rage. He bound and tortured her, then threw her body into a well. But she came back as a ghost each night and would recount the dishes. When she found only nine, she would scream and vanish, returning the next night to repeat her ritual. The haunting terrified everyone in the castle, so the lord hired a Buddhist priest to exorcise Okiku’s spirit. When she returned that night, she counted to nine as usual, but before she could scream, the priest quickly shouted “ten”. Relieved that the tenth dish had apparently been found, Okiku told the priest what the samurai had done to her and departed for the underworld. The samurai was tried for the murder and thrown down the very same well.

(Continued in comments)

#speculativebiologyart #xenobiology #creaturedesign #alienart #speculativefiction by @johnjmeszaros

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2 months ago

Been working on a campaign for my roleplaying group for the Alien TTRPG. The setting is an aquatic mining colony on an icy Europa-like moon orbiting a gas giant. The moon also hosts the ruins of an ancient space jockey city and I’ve previously posted some of my jockey designs. But I’ve also been designing new xenomorph variations inspired by all those cool, weird hybrid aliens from the 90s Kenner toy line.

The colonists come primarily from Mexico and Central America, where Indigenous culture and art has seen a major resurgence, so much of the colony’s aesthetic is based on Aztec, Mayan, and other Mesoamerican peoples. The mining colony hangs from the bottom of the moon’s icy crust, facing into the miles-deep ocean underlying it.

Las Lloronas are massive siphonophore-like colonial animals from this subterranean sea. Their name comes from the fact that they were first encountered as unearthly wailing shrieks heard over radios and other electronic devices. When one of the creatures was finally seen and studied, researchers discovered that they communicate via radio waves emitted in a narrow bandwidth that can penetrate several hundred feet through saltwater. These sounds, combined with the creatures’ ghostly appearance led to comparisons to the Weeping Woman of Latino folklore. Las lloronas regularly visit the thick acrylic windows of the colony where the city’s light draw swarms of plankton. The creatures have become mascots for the colony and an annual La Llorona festival is held in their honor.

Recently, a creature resembling a twisted nightmare version of La Llorona has started to appear. In place of la llorona’s feeding gastrozooids, the new creature has clusters of xenomorph-like heads with grasping tongues that rip to shreds any marine life that comes near. The colonists have dubbed these monsters Las Malinches since they are seen as a “betrayal” of the beauty and etherealness of the original las llornas. Las Malinches have begun attacking mining subs leaving the colony, and even hurl themselves at the colony’s windows, leading to fear and dread throughout the colony.

#xenomorph #alien #creaturedesign #alienrpg #kenneraliens by @johnjmeszaros

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3 months ago

Some more cardboard window cut-outs I made for Dinosaur Trolley weekends at my museum. These black-and-white creatures are based on the Iguanodon and Megalosaurus sculptures at the Crystal Palace in London. These were the first depictions of dinosaurs ever created, built by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. Also included are more realistic Iguanodon and Megalosaurus heads.

#dinosaurs #dinosaurart #ctartist #museum #cardboardart by @johnjmeszaros

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3 months ago

Also made some painted cardboard dinosaur heads to go in the trolley car windows at my job for Dinosaur Weekend.

Featured creatures: Pachyrhinosaurus, Tapejara, and Shunosaurus.

#dinosaurs #dinosaurart #museum #ctartist #cardboardcreations by @johnjmeszaros

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3 months ago

Made a head hole cut-out board for my trolley museum job.

(Don’t actually know what to call these things. Photo stand-in? Face-in-the-hole board? Photo op board?)

#dinosaursofinstagram #dinosaur #museum #trolley #dinosaurart by @johnjmeszaros

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3 months ago

Another Paul Blaisdell B-movie monster in Pride colors. This is the alien that appears briefly at the end of “The Beast With A Million Eyes” decked out in the Genderqueer flag colors. This was the movie that actually started Blaisdell’s career. The titular Beast is a disembodied being made of pure mental energy. It could possess any living creature and use them as its eyes and ears as it slowly took over Earth, hence the title.
However, the director wanted an actual monster to appear in the movie and he hired Blaisdell- who had painted several covers for pulp sci-fi magazines- to create a puppet that would show up at the end. The being, who Blaisdell named “Little Hercules” is meant to be an enslaved servant of the disembodied beast, forced to carry out its will.

#pridemonth #genderqueerpride #bmovie #mysterysciencetheater3000 #monstermovie by @johnjmeszaros

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4 months ago

Another Paul Blaisdell B-movie monster in Pride colors. This is a Saucer Man from the 1957 “Invasion of the Saucer Men” in Pansexual colors. Blaisdell made four costumes of the invaders, along with a prop hand that could crawl on its own, aided by an eyeball embedded in its wrist.

#pridemonth #bmovie
#pansexualpride #alien #mst3k by @johnjmeszaros

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4 months ago

Another creation of SFX designer Paul Blaisdell for the 1956 B-movie “It Conquered the World” wearing Pride colors. This is a fungus-based entity from Venus that Blaisdell named “Beulah” in Trans Pride colors. Blaisdell always put a ton of thought into the backgrounds for his monsters. At the time, it was believed that Venus was a hot, humid world like a sweltering jungle. So Blaisdell imagined Beulah as a giant, semi-mobile fungus that communicated telepathically. She wasn’t supposed to move very much, and would instead spawn little bat-like minions that could latch onto other beings and control them.

#transpride #mst3k
#pridemonth #bmovie
#transflag by @johnjmeszaros

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4 months ago