I came up with this idea of painting scenes from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings with the night sky as it would actually appear on that date and time, so I went through LOTRs and marked up all the references to when the night sky was visible, there’s quite a few references 😉 Anyway, I decided for the first illustration to work out how the sky would have looked as the left Bag End, then I painted the scene – the sky took far too long, then,…
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It’s a steam punk theme this month over on John’s website, so I decided to steam pun a Lord of the Rings cover 😉
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It’s horsey time for the theme of the month over on John Howe’s website, or rather it’s Saddle Up – as I’m not brilliant at drawing horses I opted for a more graphical approach and decided to try and paint some flags on display many years after the Return of the King 😉 I started off painting this in watercolour but it didn’t go well so went digital…
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We had the opportunity to visit the Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth exhibition at the Bodleian, Oxford earlier this month as we were visiting the area (okay, we visited Oxfordshire because the exhibition was on ;-)). I had read various reviews online both from friends and in the media and was rather keen to see it for myself. The exhibition didn’t disappoint, seeing the original maps that J.R.R.T. and his son worked on was something I never thought I’d see, and his original illustrations were simply amazing. I must admit to…
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I have a for a while been tinkering with a digital piece for the theme of the month ‘competition’ over on John Howe‘s website, the them Dawn’s Early Light was one that appealed to me but the digital piece really wasn’t working out as I wanted it to. For some reason the line from Lord of the Rings kept going through my head “Yet dawn is ever the hope of men,” so I decided to play with type instead of banging my head against the wall with the failing digital…
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