Lord of the Watercolour :P

[sigune]

I had to try out my new watercolours, of course. They are Blockx - an excellent Belgian brand of which up until last week I had never even heard. I bought 25 colours at a 50 % discount because, alas, the art shop in my street that used to carry them is going to stop selling Blockx :(. My guess is that they are just too expensive and in times of crisis they don't sell easily :/. They are really good though - certainly on equal footing with my beloved Winsor & Newton.



So today you get Elves with Blockx :-). I am rereading Lord of the Rings (last time I read it I was 12 or 13) - all because of the_winterwitch. There is a possibility that I'll be painting some LotR art for her, so I thought I'd better reacquaint myself with the material. I am much enjoying the reading, I have to say, but from an art-y point of view I am experiencing a few ... well, maybe not problems, but LotR isn't working the same way for me that the Harry Potter series and A Song of Ice and Fire do.


Thing is, Tolkien is so epic. And I mean this form-wise. Old epics don't exactly go in for lots of character development and they don't lose themselves in descriptions of people. The heroes are 'fair', 'noble', and occasionally you find out whether they are dark-haired or blond. There are characters who look really odd, such as Lady Ragnell, Kundry the messenger of the Grail King, some giants and dwarves, and they get some description - usually because they are especially ugly. Handsome people are just 'handsome'. Tolkien, likewise, gives me 'noble', 'tall', 'ageless', 'fair', and he also tells me that Gimli has a beard. Aragorn occasionally looks 'worn'. Oooookay. I guess these hints ought to be enough - but in this case they are not enough to drive the images from the Peter Jackson films from my head.

I normally refuse to base my book fanart on film designs. I tend to draw based on book descriptions and I am not interested in drawing actors. Usually I have my own idea of what a character looks like. For LotR I kind of don't. I'm still not interested in drawing portraits of actors - but if I don't use reference, I drift in the direction of "Generic Sigune Guy" for everyone :/. So I did use a photo of Hugo Weaving as reference when drawing Elrond. The result... Well, I guess it couldn't serve as an accurate likeness of Hugo Weaving, but it wouldn't offend people who expect Elrond to look like Hugo Weaving. Or would it? :-)

the_winterwitch,in case you like what this looks like, please be warned that I'm not sure I can reproduce this particular Elrond. I can try though.

For Generic Elf, see below...





What was fun about these two is that I drew them in all of five minutes. That probably shows, BUT it was fun drawing quickly just for once. I tend to overwork things, and it was nice to (re)discover that sometimes I can actually make five-minute drawings (even though they are very simple) that aren't riddled with mistakes.

Comments

[lunafish.livejournal.com]

Ooo, I'm so jazzed to see LotR elves, and I actually quite like the "generic" elves, esp. that close up, maybe even more so than Elrond. There's such a lovely, pensive quality there.

[sigune.livejournal.com]

Thank you! :D

Ah, to be honest, I can crank out the Generic Elves by the dozen. These little profiles come very easily to me (in fact they are among the few things that come to me easily art-wise XD). Whenever I have trouble with something else I do one of these - they tend to turn out well and give me a tiny boost... I have been thinking I should paint them more often just by way of warming-up and exercise.

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Well, I think they're lovely! It's true, I guess, that Tolkien doesn't spend a lot of time describing his characters, but there were times when Jackson simply ignored the descriptions on the page. Example: Boromir and Faramir are both dark-haired in the book; Jackson made them blond. And he does describe Frodo pretty well: "Taller than some and fairer than most; a perky chap with a cleft in his chin-". Book Frodo has rather fair hair and (if I'm remembering rightly) hazel eyes; Sam should be brown-haired and brown-eyed. Jackson made Frodo blue-eyed, and Sam blond. Go figure.

On the whole, though, I've got to say, the movie is well cast - even though nobody looks quite the way I imagine them. I do like your Elrond rather better than movie Elrond, though! I just never imagined Elrond looking at all like Hugo Weaving!

[sigune.livejournal.com]

LOL! I loved reading Elfquest as a teen, so when I thought of Elrond, and any other of the Tolkien Elves, I rather imagined them like the High Ones or the elves of the Blue Mountain. In the meantime, of course, I am very much influenced by the films, and I agree that the casting was quite good. The only time I really went "huh?!" when I read the book version and compared it to the film character was when I encountered the passages about Denethor. I find Denethor quite detestable in the film (not the actor's fault, I might add) - in the book he isn't quite so impossible and stupid and incompetent, and he gets compared to Aragorn, which in the film wouldn't be at all apt. Also, there is an explanation to how he gets so pessimistic and finally crazy. In the film he's just plain horrible all the time.

One of the things that shocked me most (I've almost finished the book - some 60 pages still to go) is how different the portrayals of Théoden (...I ♥ Théoden) are. I *love* Bernard Hill's Théoden and didn't at all recall him differently from my first reading of LotR. But now I see how negatively he is painted in the film as compared to the book. In the book, Aragorn and Gandalf are all for the move towards Helm's Deep, and Théoden is a competent king and an astute strategist throughout. In the films... not so much. They used Théoden as a kind of foil for Aragorn and Gandalf, and Aragorn, in particular, becomes positively messianic. I like Aragorn better in the book, in fact, where he always wants to be king, and reassures the others at the same time of the fact that he is still Strider. And he has a sense of humour :).

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

I so agree about both Theoden and Denethor - the two old men who are very deliberately contrasted and compared in the books. Both are diminished in Jackson's films. A very bright young girl (Greek Orthodox), talking to me about the films, said, "They take honor away from some characters to give it to others". She - and I - didn't like what the filmmakers did to Treebeard, either, nor the diminishment of Sam. Sean Astin (like Sean Bean) nails his character down so thoroughly that the absurdities in the script don't really matter. And Theoden, in the final film, is close to the character as written. I wish that were true of both Faramir and his father, and that we'd gotten to see some of Eowyn and Faramir's conversation on film!

Oh - I like Aragorn better in the book, too - though I have to say I love what they did with HIS love story in the films. But the books are, quite naturally, loaded with Christ figures, and Aragorn isn't really even the first among equals (that would be Sam, IMHO). In the movie, he's the main hero, it seems, and that's all wrong. It puts the emphasis in the wrong place.

Just one more thing: the main way they get Theoden wrong? As well as still acting as though he were still ensorcelled, he lacks courtesy. So does Aragorn. I blogged about this, years ago. It's really a pity that Jackson didn't even try to comprehend what courtesy meant to Tolkien. My two cents!

Anyway, I love your elves. :)

[themostepotente.livejournal.com]

Mmm, your Elrond is sex on a stick <3

[sigune.livejournal.com]

Hee hee! Because I'm me, that is probably accidental ;P. Glad you like him!

[snarkysneak.livejournal.com]

It would take me forever to draw what you did in five minutes and it wouldn't look an eighth as good. I liked them a lot. :)

[sigune.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much! I guess this is my comfort zone... :-)

[cabepfir.livejournal.com]

I am, as you can see, totally out of lj these days (in fact, I haven't opened my own lj in one month!) and I had almost skipped this entry. I'm afraid that Hugo Weaving will always be Agent Smith for me. One week ago I watched Cloud Atlas and Weaving features in multiple roles there. I still thought of him as Agent Smith, though ;) In any case, Cloud Atlas is excellent and I highly recommend it.

[sigune.livejournal.com]

"Agent Smith"? I have to confess I haven't seen a single film with Hugo Weaving in it apart from the LotR trilogy XD. I know, I know, bettyboop_comic is always telling me I have no pop culture...

Do you think he looks very "Weaving"? I'm just a bit bothered by the fact that lately I seem to be drawing all faces the same way, and I thought that using a real person as a model might yield some variation - though my aim is not to do an actor portrait.

[cabepfir.livejournal.com]

Agent Smith from The Matrix. He continued to work with the Wachowski siblings in V for Vendetta and in Cloud Atlas that is the film I'm currently in love with.

I do believe your Elrond resembles Hugo Weaving, but not in a slavish way.

[lindahoyland.livejournal.com]

Love your artwork!This looks very Elrond.

[sigune.livejournal.com]

Hello and welcome!

Out of curiosity, may I ask how you found my journal? :D

I intend to do some more LotR art - I hope you'll like it!

[lindahoyland.livejournal.com]

I found your journal as Winterwitch mentioned your artwork on hers and I thought I'd take a look, liked what you saw and added you to my list as I look forward to seeing more. I liked your Gawain artwort too. I can't draw to save my life!
Will look forward to your next drawings.