Went to the DC Natural History Museum before SPX and drew this Allosaurus skull. Spent a long time in the dinosaur section remembering that feeling I had all the time around age 8 to 12 where I could not believe how awesome it was that dinosaurs ever existed.
Started working on a big drawing to be a new convention banner and a print and some other things. I am taking a whole lot of process pictures and I’ll keep you updated…
These are a few of the thumbnails; the second one is the tightest I got it before starting the drawing.
GOSH I have not updated this in a while. Moving to a new place is distracting. I’ll get back to this blog, I promise. Above is the view out the window of my little drawing-room, into the ‘porthole’ that runs down the middle of our building for heat regulation I guess.
Warmup drawing made in several passes, fiddling with a scifi idea I have which is, at this point, little more than aesthetic, and which I haven’t put as much effort as I should have into writing in earnest.
The alien you might recognize from an earlier post. I think his name is Than, with a non-vocalized “th,” as in “thin” but not in “that.” Tried to design some sensible pressure-suit for him. The plating on the chest is supposed to mimic his weird ribcage. The human is named Monro. This was mostly an excuse to do weird lighting stuff.
Finally finally. I’ve been too busy working on real stuff to do much freetime drawing.
This is the Balrog of Moria, and that under it is the Bridge of Khazad Dum. Very different from the previous drawings I think. As always, I’m trying to go just by the description of the text, but this one was probably colored quite a bit by the Balrog’s design in the Peter Jackson movies, which I think is pretty excellent. The book describes a large, man-shaped creature, with a ‘mane of fire,’ and what seems to be a kind of fluid, changing form of fire and shadow. The text mentions 'wings;’ but I think does so metaphorically (“…the shadow about it reached out like two vast wings.”), and also I feel wings would clutter up the image and sort of dilute the design of the thing.
Next is the Orc Chieftain that leads an attack on the Fellowship in Moria (before the Balrog bit, actually), whenever I can get around to it. You can see all previous LOTR drawings in one place by tag, here.
That thing I’ve been doing preliminary work on for two years; I am finally drawing it now. This is a tiny preview of it, and I am proud of the fact I have let little to nothing else slip about it yet.
I would love it if you’d read Vattu if you hadn’t; we’re at kind of a turning point so now might be a good spot to pick it up.
A little china-marker drawing and a coloring experiment. I like the texture a lot and I’d love to draw a comic this way someday. One of those things where there’s an image in your head that seems clear but you can never get it right, and the more you try the more you forget the original image.
This is a Pierson’s Puppeteer, which is an alien from Larry Niven’s Ringworld, which I have been listening to while drawing recently. I’d heard a lot about the book before reading it and was very excited to start it, but it has become almost difficult to sit through.
Ringworld kind of reminds me of Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama and Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris- all three of these books deal with people trying to understand massive, mysterious artifacts in outer space. But where Rama and Solaris convey a clear sense of the enormity of the discovery and its strangeness, Ringworld dampens any sense of wonder by its bland writing style and frequent and embarrassing attempts at humor. There’s some pervasive sexism in the treatment of the main (only) female character, which seems particularly out of place in an invented setting distant in so many other ways from the 1970 America in which is was written. I really don’t like this book very much but I will probably finish it because it’s an audiobook and it is easy to listen to while drawing.
But anyway I wanted to draw this alien because I thought it looked cool.