The Hobbit: Wolf Rider Watercolor Step #2

The second sitting and I am losing my mind.  I have no idea how I got here.  The paint dried this way while I wasn't looking.  There are about 10,000 happy accidents here and only about 3 or 4 bits that I actually meant to do.  I'm not sure if that is good or bad really, but we'll take it one more day and see what we get.  

The Hobbit: Wolf-Rider Watercolor Step #1

This is the second study in preparation for the Battle of Five Armies. (I know you are thinking that I am just stalling at this point and that I should be getting on with it about now.  Maybe so, but I really want to get this one right!)

My plan for this Wolf Rider piece is to take the watercolor stage further, past my usual stopping point of colored underpainting that has been the base for the previous Hobbit pieces.  This is the first sitting and what you see here is about my usual stopping point for a transition to digital. Achieving the real deep darks in watercolor without losing control of the piece has always been something of a challenge for me.  

In the next few posts I will be posting my progress with this.  

Side Note:

On the digital front, my pc is still a smoking ruin, and I am still saving my pennies for a glorious 8x core Mac Pro.  (Example Below) 

The Reluctant Dragon: Final Painting

The painting was done at 12x18 on gessoed massonite. Although I am pleased with the results overall, I am still a bit nervous about wether to attempt the Battle of Five Armies like this. I have a feeling that with the level of detail it will demand, it might actually take me more than a month and a half to finish. Also, I will need to render the piece at around 42" wide. Another problem is how to scan in a painting (on massonite) at that size. Does anyone out there know of any scanners that can handle something that size? I'd hate to have to try to piece that together using our 12 x 18 scanner here at the studio...

The Reluctant Dragon: Digital Sketch

This is an image from better days, when my pc was still working.... 

I really enjoy piecing my compositions together digitally. This is one of the most useful aspects of photoshop for me. I love being able to arrange and re-arrange the compositions so easily. It makes it easier to try out compositional ideas. I can try out a crazy idea, and if it flops then I can try it another way without losing hours and hours of redrawing everything.  The ease with which you can move elements around and mirror things is really helpful for me.

The Reluctant Dragon: Thumbnail

This week I take yet another brief step away from the Hobbit illustrations to do some experimenting. This time it will be in oil.

This thumbnail is one I did for the Reluctant Dragon.  This is a fairy tale that I have wanted illustrate for a long time, and this first adventure in oils seems like the perfect opportunity for it. 

And so I am pulling out both the oil paints as well as every scrap of literature I can find on Rembrandt. Of the great Masters, he is the one I am always drawn to the most. There is a gem-like quality to his paintings that destroy me. His work is terrifically inspiring.  

Disaster Strikes!

Just when everything was going so well, the Goblins got my pc.

"They have taken the bridge, and the second hall. We can not get out. The end comes. Drums, drums in the deep. They are coming..."

This morning my pc crashed. 

Every possible spell and incantation I could think of only resulted in another variation of the Blue Screen of Death. Evidently, the primary hard drive is bacon.  Crispy, smoking bacon.  I am fortunate to have had all my data on a second hard drive, but as for the machine itself, it is dead. 

This puts something of a damper on the digital half of the watercolor/digital method that I have been employing in these Hobbit pieces. This is what you get for taking a ring of power from Bill Gates the Deceiver. There is only one Lord of the Rings, and he does not share power....

So, while I save my pennies for a shining new Mac Pro, (the new 8x cores look wicked hot) there are a number of other possible solutions that present themselves for how to go about tackling the Battle of Five Armies. (The show must go on) For some time now I have been wanting to get back into oils and I am very tempted to attempt this piece with them. The drawback would of course be that it would probably take me a month and a half to finish it properly with the drying properties of oils. The other option would be to try take the watercolor step itself farther towards finished than I have done in the other pieces. Most of these other pieces have been finished to something like a very light underpainting in watercolor, which allows me a number of really interesting possibilities digitally. There are a few effects in photoshop that look really great over watercolor underpaintings. Digital painting also offers a lot of really compelling lighting effects that I can't find suitable traditional alternatives to (and by suitable, I mean that don't take a month and a half with drying) I also really enjoy the vibrancy of color that is easily achievable in digital painting. However, it looks as though I may have to do without my digital tools in this endeavor. So, before beginning the Battle of Five Armies, I am going to be doing a few odd experiments in oils. We'll have to see how it works out. Let me know what you think as I post these up.

The Hobbit featured on Tor.com

Recently, I did an interview with the wonderful Irene Gallo of Tor Books on the Hobbit illustrations. Many of you will already know Irene from her work in the fantastic arts community and from her blog, which is a great source for what is afoot in the illustration and sci-fi art world. Others of you may remember her from an earlier Quickhidehere post on Comicon 08. This new interview on the Hobbit illustrations is now up on Tor.com. In it you will find a lot more about the process and thinking behind the illustrations as well as my take on how to roundhouse kick your way through an economic recession. Check it out.

Smaug: Final Digital Steps

Next Up: The Battle of Five Armies!

Smaug: Digital Process

Smaug: Watercolor

Smaug: A Dragon for a New Year

"There he lay, a vast red-gold dragon, fast asleep; a thrumming came from his jaws and nostrils, and wisps of smoke, but his fires were low in slumber. Beneath him, under all his limbs and his huge coiled tail, and about him on all sides stretching away across unseen floors, lay countless piles of precious things, gold wrought and unwrought, gems and jewels, and silver red-stained in the ruddy light."

Smaug: Symbolism

I have always seen Smaug as the great dragon from Beowulf. Tolkien was a Beowulf enthusiast and it was he who first spoke for the merits of the Beowulf poem on its literary quality and narrative elements, as art and not just as a means by which we can learn about Anglo-Saxon history. He writes at length about this in his lecture,"Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics."
In creating Smaug, and in writing of Bilbo's interaction with him, Tolkien drew heavily from Beowulf and the stories reflect one another clearly.
In both stories a thief takes a golden cup from a sleeping dragon. The dragon wakes up and realizes that a piece of his treasure horde has been stolen. He searches everywhere for the cup and cannot find it. He finds the track of the thief and follows it, circling all around his trove. Then when he cannot find him, he returns to his mound and lies in wait, like a cat, eyes slit, murderously alert, for the thief to return.
Then sitting brooding there over how he has been wronged, he is overcome by his fury and wrath. Tolkien said himself that "...The episode of the theft arose naturally (and almost inevitably) from the circumstances. It is difficult to think of any other way of conducting the story at this point. I fancy the author of Beowulf would say much the same."
There is something very human about the dragon's actions and motivations in both stories. They are fascinating because you can relate to them.
John Gardner, in Grendel, which is his adaptation of the story of Beowulf as told from the antagonists point of view, also writes on this same dragon. Gardner takes it further though, and he works down to the character's essentially fatalistic worldview. He deals with what type of human thinking leads to a man becoming what the dragon in these 3 stories is. The Dragon in Gardner's Grendel, is an ancient creature, very much a miserly, mean-spirited old man. He knows everything there is to know. He sees everything from every angle and has determined through the obviousness of existence that there are no absolutes and no basis for truth except what you determine for yourself. The Dragon believes that existence is a chain reaction of accidents. No beliefs or ideoligies can be real. And in the end, after stripping absolutes away, the Dragon is left with nothing but his own immediate greed as the only substantive belief that consistently appeals to him. His last admonition in this story, his last advice to the Grendel, and to the audience is, "to find a pile of gold, and sit on it."
In Grendel, the Dragon becomes archetypical of nihilistic thinking. All the Dragon has left is his immediate greed. His desire for possessions in this, isn't the desire of the collector or the caretaker, that it is the gold's beauty or craftsmanship that appeals to him, but rather that other creatures might want to possess it, it is the far end of greed that wants something for the sake of preventing another from having it.

Another concept that has been put forth on the dragon in The Hobbit is that he could be seen as symbolic of the traditional relationship between evil and metallurgy. Perhaps even of industry, as these were themes that found their way into Tolkien's writing. Originally I was very taken by this idea and I wanted to make the dragon look like he was made of bronze that had patinad and that his scales were of metal that was rusting and flaking away. I like the idea that he literally did eat his gold and metal to give him armor, and that, like all things earthly, it was deteriorating away. His original skin and scales are long since gone, since he started introducing these heavy metals into his system, and now he must eat ever more and more as he ages, to keep his skin armored as the old metal rusts and flakes away faster and faster.

However, as much as this idea made arcs of lightning in my brain for being a cool visual metaphor, it simply wouldn't do for this image. The classic image is of a red dragon and in the end, I preferred a more personal, brooding, hateful greed that I see in the dragon to the more abstract notions of metallurgy or industry as the dragon being symbolic of. I may at some point go back and do a version of the dragon with metal flaking off him, but for now, I will stick with a more classic Smaug who is fascinating enough on his own.