A first attempt at Bilbo escaping to the eyrie.
Read MoreTag: illustration
Death of Smaug
I was sketching dragons again recently, well I often sketch dragons but this time there was a purpose, the theme of the month over at john-howe.com for December was Dragons. As a certain dragon was on my mind with the Desolation of Smaug hitting the silver screen* I ended up wondering how Smaug would look after the black arrow had done its job 😉 This was a fun dragon to work on, well any character from Tolkien is fun to attempt – rather than use traditional medium I worked in…
Read MoreThe Arabian Knight
I should start by saying I’ve been under the weather since the weekend, coughing fits, breathless, dizzy… great fun really 😉 anyway I couldn’t settle sitting doing nothing at all but wasn’t fit to do any real work :-/ so I decided to finish of my Arabian Knight painting – it obviously took me two hours to paint one rock as I either had to stop and cough up a lung or wait while my nose stopped running. Anyway, here’s the Arabian Knight – Mainly gouache on watercolour board with…
Read MoreUnder the stars
I’ve had a few ideas for star filled paintings recently, mainly they’ve been science fiction with sleek space ships zooming around. However the other day I returned to a Tolkien theme of Hobbits wandering under a star filled sky. The main aim was to make the Hobbits just visible enough to be in the painting yet make it believable that they were wandering under the stars with little to no Moon to illuminate the scene. Another aim was to use real star positions rather than just splatter the painting with…
Read MoreWæterfeallan
I was quite looking forward to my week off work, the veg plot needed clearing out then dug over, and for once the weather was looking promising. So what happened? Well, my mind kept going back to a rough sketch I’d made a while ago, I was thinking about how I would tackle painting it. Not only was I thinking about the technicalities of painting the scene but I was busy thinking about the story that went with it, who loved there, why it was located where it was…. That’s…
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