Maker of Middle-Earth

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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Yet Dawn….

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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Books, they open unexpected doors…

The theme of the month for July over on John Howe’s website is ‘Books‘, which started me thinking about books and what they mean to different people. To me they often open doors to unexpected places, or sometimes to expected places but where you often discover something new 😉 So this is a composite in photoshop of a book opening a doorway into the Shire, with a willing Hobbit ready for a wander 🙂

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Old Man Willow

I sat down to do a serious, detailed study of Old Man Willow (as seen in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (just in case anyone was wondering)). So I’m unsure how I ended up doing this 😉 Tired of rescuing pesky Hobbits from the clutches of Old Man Willow, Tom Bombadil decided to put up a sign warning those approaching of the dangers. “If that doesn’t work, I’ll hack the darned thing down.” He muttered to himself walking away from the newly erected sign.

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