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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As it’s the final theme over on John Howe’s website it’s all about endings, so I decided to paint a scene from near the end of the Hobbit… I had previously tried this scene in pen and ink but thought paint was more appropriate this time 😉
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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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I had a small piece of watercolour board left over from the last project so I decided to practice mixing greys, as you do 😉 Needing a subject I opted to paint one of Tolkien’s illustrations of the Lonely Mountain. Grey has never been an easy colour to mix for me so the rubble strewn and scorched landscape surround the front gate was an ideal subject.
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Tangents are quite interesting at times, and also quite frustrating. A while ago I started to think what the view would be from Bilbo’s front door if you reversed the Shire map (by Tolkien)… This of course led me to the illustration by Tolkien of the Hill… Which of course meant I needed to know how those buildings would look from the other side, the easiest solution of course is to do a quick mock up in 3D… In the end, sitting doodling was an easier solution to getting the…
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