Red Robot
I drew a robot for no reason at all! Here it is. It has some glowy Tron bits.
See more posts like this on Tumblr
#drawingMore you might like
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.
Starkness again
Redo, maybe, of that earlier drawing of a setting from A Voyage to Arcturus. Feel like I don’t really know what I’m doing working in grayscale!
Radagast
Radagast the Brown, Gandalf’s friend who appears only second-hand in LOTR. Does he show up in any others of Tolkien’s works? I haven’t read anything but LOTR and Children of Húrin and the Hobbit long ago. I like the character anyway.
Rather than skimming my copy of the book for reference for these drawings, I’ve downloaded an audiobook of the whole book, and I’ve been listening to it while drawing comics. I forgot about audiobooks; they are really the best.
Perdido Street Station
Finally finished this drawing! See it larger. It’s Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, a central character of China Miéville’s novel Perdido Street Station. I highly recommend the book, it is fantastic in every sense of the word! I think I’ve been talking about it incessantly and for that I apologize. I’ll move on to another of his books very soon… The Scar has been recommended to me a few times.
PSS is a very visual book, and one that deals at length with some pretty outrageous creatures and inventions. After several false starts, I decided to draw something that focused more on the feel of the book than on any representation of any of those visual elements specifically. I almost feel that rendering the Slake Moths, or Mr. Motley, or the constructs would put too fine a point on them, and spoil the strange, psychedelic nature of them– for myself and for those of you who haven’t read the book yet!
Legolas
Hard to keep up with this project, apparently! Here’s Legolas, another of the Fellowship. More will be coming soon.
I’m finishing 2 pages a day of Order of Tales pretty regularly, now; that is taking up all of my drawing-time.
A book I am reading
I am reading a book called Foreigner by C.J. Cherryh, and that is what this drawing pertains to. I’m really interested in books about contact with space aliens recently, but I’ve never found any of them satisfactorily weird. Foreigner deals with these aliens called atevi who are mostly humanish but not completely, and the difficulties a displaced population of humans has in interacting with them. Have really enjoyed it, and there’s some interesting ideas, but Cherryh overexplains everything.
I’m going to try to read more, and to draw something from every book I read. I have trouble seeing things in my head without drawing them.
small drawing very close
Ringworld
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.
here’s a little person i’ve been drawing lately
The Balrog
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.