Amazing what Cassiopeia can do to a person
Star Crossed Elf
drawn about Nov 13, ‘03
posted for Dec 31, 2006
(31)
An elf at Cuivienen, carrying on from the last picture, glancing around at someone who disturbed him from staring at Cassiopeia, also known as Wilwarin, the Butterfly. Isn’t he beautiful? The stars are still glittering in his eyes… And I shaded it. Isn’t that special?
We watched Mom’s Christmas movie on Sunday, and it was called Cars. I enjoyed it very much, even if I found it a bit predictable at times. For example, in the climactic race, Lightening pulls out of a near-fatal turn… and he still has two more to go. Well, they’re not going to have two more bland turns and have him win… there’s going to be some sort of drama mixed in! And I was right! I do love the lines they put in the trailer, though…
Lightening: “I can’t be doing this. I’m a precision instrument of speed and aerodynamics!”
Mater: “Ya hert yer whaaat??”
I don’t know if the predictability is a good thing or a bad thing… a good thing because it means I’m thinking like a storyteller, or a bad thing because it’s a predictable movie (poorly written). Anyway, it was entertaining, especially the “A Toy Cars Story” during the credits. That was good.
Hey, and I forgot to say that Glorfindel, I think, is my first picture of a male elf with long hair. I finally got my styles straightened out! Now elves with short hair look funny! And I used to think of Legolas with short black hair… o_O7
This is Cuivienen, the lake beside which Tolkien’s elves first woke and gazed up at the stars. It was so beautiful… and when I heard Enya’s song Shepherd Moons, I knew it was the perfect descriptor. The parts with the singing are the elves singing in wonder and the echoes of their song coming from deep within the forest… the instrumental parts are their silent contemplation of the stars. It was so gorgeous… It made me cry a couple times, it was so beautiful. This picture doesn’t nearly do it justice. I should do a new one with the new art markers I was given.
Another Zela picture! This time, I went for setting rather than character, and this is a terrific picture. Much better than I expected.
This is a picture of more of those Mirkwoodian elves, the tree elves, I suppose. I had trouble drawing in scale, so that’s why the ones in the back are bigger than the ones in front. At least the ones who are biggest are the most important.
This is Esgalwen, a young elf-maiden living in Mirkwood, or as they call it, I believe the name is Taur-nu-Fuin: Forest under Shadow. I think they changed the name after Sauron got booted, though, back to its old name Greenwood the Great. She has black hair and brown eyes, and likes running and dancing through the forest: she’s one of the ‘childlike’ elves. I made her up. She also likes singing, and I imagine most of the songs on Enya’s Shepherd Moons CD as being sung by her… not the first one; that one will be described on the page for the 29th. One or two on the A Day Without Rain CD I also imagine being sung by her, such as Only Time, which she sings with her older sister, sitting in a glade with one playing a harp and one playing a cello.
This is Fingon, with the harp, playing to Maedhros, the one chained by the wrist. I drew this based on a particularly dramatic scene in the Silmarillion, and I even shaded parts of it! It looks pretty good! Maedhros’s portrait is a close-up; he’s not really in that space in the air. The dark smudge on the mountain behind Fingon is him. The only problem is that I drew it with Maedhros chained by the wrong wrist, so this is actually flipped from the way I drew it… but it’s the right way around now. I was going to shade the mountain Fingon’s leaning against too, but I decided it was too big a job and I didn’t know how to do it, so it would get ruined if I did it.
Okay dokay, I was not able to update yesterday like I said I would, and I have to be quick today because my brother’s bugging me to play a game with him.
Glorfindel, my hero! I was really happy with this picture when I drew it, and I’m really happy with it still. I adore the passage where Tolkien describes him:
The first successful picture of Legolas I have ever drawn! I pronounce his name a bit differently… My first version had short black hair, but he was still pretty handsome. I especially remember the part where he sings the song of Nimrodel. He also laughs a lot more in the book, and is generally more cheerful. My favourite lines…
Gimli was drawn on the same page as Boromir, but there’s a lot of space between them for even more people I never got around to doing.