Inspirational Spam

Whenever I’m feeling down, I just check out my spam folder.  It really hammers home what a great blogger I am.  Just check out this glowing review:

“A person essentially help to make critically articles I would state. This is the very first time I frequented your website page and thus far? I surprised with the research you made to make this particular post amazing. Fantastic process!”

Another comment stated how “absolutely written” this site is.  I admit, there were tears.

Roaming my wayward way by the wayside of life, I haven’t posted in a while, which is a crime considering my fantastic process, so I thought I’d dump some recent artwork and lay down some jazz about life and stuff.

Firstly, I have to gush a little about the books Dana got me for Christmas!  Such wonders!  Check out these Barnes & noble ultra-deluxe supercollections!  They’re so beautiful!  With gold-leaf pages!  As Charlie Brown would say, “WAUUUUGH!”

And that H. P. Lovecraft collection is quite literally ‘complete’.  It’s insane.  It’d take like twenty Daw pulp paperbacks to equal what they crammed into that catechism-sized volume.  It makes you feel like you’re attending Miskatonic U. just holding it.  It’s all heavy and uncomfortable and awkward to hold in bed, just like the Necronomicon would be!  Joy.  The design of these things is just brilliant.  I want more.  MORE!!!  Maybe next Christmas…

And speaking of well-designed, Bible-sized amazingness, there’s THIS:

Dagnabbit, BUY THIS BOOK!  There are graphic novels, and then there are *tympani drumroll* >>>GRAPHIC NOVELS<<<.  Craig Thompson was already working on this when I finally got around to reading his wonderful ‘Blankets’, and I have been eagerly awaiting its release.  Pulling it from under the tree was a fantastic treat.  There really is no way to accurately describe this book, suffice to say it is big, long, deep and probably the most beautiful book I’ve ever seen, right up there with the Book of Kells and The Wood Beyond the World.  My brain hurts imagining the work that went into this, and I have to take breaks from it often due to beauty overload.  The writing’s not bad either.  Craig makes me want to make things that make people’s eyes hurt for wonder; I am thankful for his inspiration and motivation.  Speaking of which…

Okay, so I haven’t been up to much artwise, but I have produced a couple of things, and here’s what’s sort of worth showing:

Mural design for our Jesus-people family:

Skyrim character art:Logo for friends’ farm:Painting practice… ugh.More to come!  Stay tuned!

More from Jonathan Strange

Well, here’s my portrait of the homeless, vagrant, swarthy, crabby and very important magician Vinculus from ‘Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell’, which I posted about last week.

I have been wanting to try a piece of art in the style of Arthur Rackham for a while, and this was a perfect chance for it.  Rackham’s sketchy, twisty linework and brown tones work perfectly for this sketchy, twisted character.  You can see that his face changed a bit from the original sketch (which was also a little hydrocephalic); I just could not get that face to look right in the inks.  It’s sad, because he looks a little more… evil than I intended him to in the final, but maybe that’s a good thing, I dunno.  Anyway, there it is!  Cheerio!

A Portrait of the Raven King as a Young Man

So I’m on my second time through ‘Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell’.  Goodness gracious, what do you say about this book?  I’m sure it’s a very niche-audience work, but I am very well within that niche of people who love Regency-era British literature, historical fiction and well-thought-out fantasy.  This novel pleases all three pleasure-centers in spades.  Didn’t know you had a Regency-era literature pleasure center, did you?  It’s easy to miss due to its quiet formality and slight aloofness, always sneering down its nose at the electronic entertainment pleasure center, which is quite the attention hog.  But I digress.

‘Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell’ is a big, thick, unruly book with many characters and lots going on.  It’s very slow at first, but once it picks up, you don’t want it to stop, what with its triple-pleasure-power.  And it… really doesn’t stop for a long long time.  It’s amazing.  Susanna Clarke spent like a DECADE writing this thing, and it is sprawling; with humor, horror, (quietly formal) romance, magic, fairies, more magic, and even a big, climactic… climax.  Jane Austen never had a big climactic climax.  (That was totally not a double-entendre regarding being a middle-aged spinster, btw.)  I hear there’s a movie on the table, which is both awesome and sad for the age-old reason that a book this huge cannot be condensed.  It’d steal its whole charm.  Aw, who knows.

Anyway, all this is to say that I started out illustrating a scene from the book-world’s history when the Raven King arrives in England for the first time after being raised by fairies in Fairie for fourteen years.  Note: that means that in this illustration he is fourteen years old.  That’s why he “looks like a girl”, to all you people who thought so.  Apparently fairies don’t think much of short hair.  *ahem*  He comes back, kicks ass, rules the Northern half of England for three hundred years, then disappears and other stuff happens (namely the stuff in the book).  But instead of illustrating the actual scene with his fairie soldiers and stuff, it just turned into a portrait due to me actually wanting to finish it.  Thus, the dude standing behind him in the sketch not being there anymore later.  Goodbye, fairie dude.  The background is a mock-up from several different photographs.

Also, below is the “light” version I made before realizing he was wearing black wool in that part.  Which was silly of me altogether because, like any hip goth guy, he only really ever wore black.  With his long, dark hair hanging greasily before his dark eyes, like pools of shadow; unfathomable and remote, dark as a raven’s wing at midnight… at the bottom of a well.  Of ink.  (Whoa– flashbacks from the “Bad Poetry Day” post…)

I’m working on another character, the street magician Vinculus, and a depiciton of the magic done at Yorkminster Cathedral, both of which I shall hopefully post shortly.  Until then I shall say “shall” more, and look down my nose at their unfinishedness with aloof haughtiness.  Pish tosh!