Tuesday, May 12, 2026

Tolkien Tuesday: Always Look On the Dark Side of Life











"Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway." — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

And, of course, ugly is easier to draw than beautiful. You should remember that I was drawing stuff from The Silmarillion only about three of four years after it was published. There was not a lot of iconography around to help me visualze. Morgoth was like Sauron, Ungoliant like Shelob, Utumno like the Dark Tower. Orc Band started out as just an effort to draw variants of Orcs. In the book the Watcher in the Water was only a mass of tentacles; in my original picture I had a knobbly lump to suggest a head as a point of focus. The mouth is an artifact of the enhancement.

No comments:

Post a Comment