Then I started scribbling around the walls to suggest they were covered in hieroglyphs and carvings. The tomb itself had to maintain the theme that something terrible was trapped inside.
The main upper shape is essentially composed of inverted triangles; in psychology of shapes, things that can hurt you like sharp and pointy forms tend to be perceived as evil, as opposed to round and soft ones. Triangles, particularly inverted triangles, are the simplest shapes that oppose round “good” forms, so that was a base for the design. I could have overdone it and put spikes everywhere but I wanted to convey the feel of an old temple made of giant stones, highly decorated, but at the core very rough and functional, in a way similar to ancient Egyptian architecture.
I thought about the façade resembling a stylized octopus head when the portal is closed, those eye-like black holes helped a lot to keep the setting more menacing. The columns on the side re-establish the vertical three-point perspective; they frame the scene and help give the impression that we are looking at something very tall.
The face didn’t look evil enough so I added the horns and there’s a bit of symbolism with the goat-like ears to echo the inverted pentagram and sigil of Baphomet, since it is typically associated with evil (Fig.04).