Out of the Frying-Pan and Into the Fire

We're now into the second year of the Hobbit, so why not celebrate with another piece of fanart?

Eomer

At the moment I'm working on some Tolkien fan art, so until I have that done, I'd like to share with you an old sketch I had lying about. I think it's supposed to be Eomer.

Gollum and the Precious

Here's my first water colour illustration in quite a while. As mentioned before I can do whatever butters my parsnips in my water colour class and I've been doing sketches of Tolkien' universe for homework in it. Now, however, I've finished the first in-class painting! It's all about Gollum and him being completely lost in the ring.

I feel I still have a long way to go in regards to water colour, but I am pleased with the result, all things considered. The rocks I found very enjoyable and I gained some new understanding of them, so that next time, the rocks will be awesomerer (hopefully!)

Anyway, here it is. Is it tasty? Is it scrumptiooooouuuussss?!

Saruman

Here's a quick water colour sketch of Saruman

A teeny tiny update

This was all I manage to cobble together over the last few days. Enjoy I guess.

Thorin Oakenshield

And now to the leader of our company, Thorin Oakenshield. I decided to do another take on the character portrait that we had to do for class. Last time I did mr Bond. This time, however, I decided to do another Tolkien character, namely Thorin, hence all the sketches that have been posted here lately. One reason for doing Thorin was of course that he is awesome, but another was that I wanted to do try out Justin Gerard's technique of painting digitally on top of a water colour painting. And he loves to do Tolkien-art, so I thought I should aswell for this project. That's enough yaking from me. Let's get to the painting (PS: More yaking to follow underneath the picture, which is about the process).

First off, I did some thumbnails that only I understand. And when that was said and done, I started to do some concepts. Most of them you've already seen, but the one posted here is the first one I did, which was done on the iApple Pad.

When all of that was tackled to the ground I did the line drawing, in which I also decided to do value as well, since I wasn't pressed for time.

That was sort of wasted time and effort, since I was doing a water colour underpainting the way Justin Gerard does it and that means that the painting is supposed to be monochromatic and therefore I would only need to think of value anyhow. I suppose it was good to have a better idea before diving into the painting, though.

I also used white gouache for the opaque highlights and some brown colour pencils on some touch ups here and there on the underpainting. I did mess it up a bit, since I pushed the lights and the darks too much. The darks were okay, but the highlights were way too light for the digital colouring to show through. Luckily for me, I managed to tone down the white in the painting enough for the colors to stick to the white (which was now no longer white).

I'm not going to lie, colouring it was hard. Trying to color it digitally was like attempting to lead a wild wolf through a sheep pen without it ending in a blood bath. However, I did find it quite enjoyable and I liked the result. Don't be surprised to see this technique be used again by me in the future. Hopefully with better understanding of what the heck I am doing.

You Shall Not PASS!

Here comes a little scene from The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien. It is presented as a book cover and it depicts the battle between Glorindel and the Balrog.

This painting has to be one of the hardest ones I have ever done. Everything about it was a struggle. Set aside all the variations of design I went through, I had to figure out how to paint things being one fire, having fire everywhere, snow, snow reflecting fire, balrog anatomy etc. There is a possibility I bit over more than I can chew. My jaw certainly hurts. I guess what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger and/or stranger, so hopefully I have learned something from this.