First concept sketches: The Tale of Ygraine

[sigune]

Ahem.

I have come to the conclusion that I need, um, a Prologue before my Prologue. I suppose that means that the Prologue will no longer be the Prologue, and that the next part I draw will be, um, the real Prologue. You see, I started Gawain's story in the right place, but - there is an overarching story that springs from what happened to Gawain's grandmother, Ygraine. I thought I could keep it until later and bring it up at some future covenient point, but I no longer think so.

In other words, I'll be working on Ygraine's tale for the next few weeks. It's still at the development stage right now, but I expect to start drawing soon. This week's concept sketches for some of the cast are under the cut...




One of the reasons why I haven't started drawing Ygraine's tale yet is because Ygraine hasn't really got a face of her own yet. She's too generic :/. She needs to have more personality if her story is to come across as the dramatic starting-point of all the action. So I'm working on that.



This gentleman is Uther Pendragon. I don't like him at all. But that is not the reason why I gave him a Roman-looking outfit :-). It is just that if Arthur is to have any historical plausibility at all, he should have lived in post-Roman Britain. Quite a few of the "first-wave" Arthurian characters have Welsh versions of Roman names - Kay, for example, is Cai in Welsh; that's short for Caius, and his father is called Hector. Merlin's Welsh name is Myrddin Emrys, Emrys being the Welsh version of Ambrosius. So I am making Uther a Roman-inspired general/king.

If you are wondering why I have drawn only half of him, well... I did start out with the intention to draw his face only, but I ended up drawing the rest of him too. Only, I'd started at the left of the page and there wasn't enough room :-).

There is stuff wrong with this (Uther's head is too large, for one thing), but I think it could have looked worse, especially for a picture drawn on a moving train *g*.





Klingsor is not a standard Arthurian character. If you know him, it's probably from Wagner's Parzival. He is a wizard who appears in Wolfram von Eschenbach's 14th-century Parzivâl. I like him because he is quite unlike the legend's stock characters. For one thing, he is a eunuch.

I'm not quite happy with how he ended up looking here, because I think I should be able to get him to look quite splendid in a Beardsley sort of way.





More Klingsor concept sketches. I can't start the story until he looks quite right.





Not sure why I like this one, because there is so very much wrong with it - but...I do :-).