REVELATION .... EOWYN AND THE NAZGUL

Recently Jon over at the ArtOrder posted a challenge for the image of Eowyn fighting the Lord of the Nazgul............great subject and lots of ideas floating about and just an all around really good challenge. So I decided to hop on this and get busy with the idea and come up with an image.

Now that the idea .....the challenge ............was out there the problem was to come up with a composition  for said idea/challenge.  As I kept thinking about it, and going thru the several possibilities of what to paint, cutting the beasts head off, going with Theodin lying there on the ground dying , and so on, it really for me came down to the moment of the reveal..........the Scooby Do moment of the mask or in this case the helmet coming off ....the " I am not a man" moment.

In this challenge the wonderful folks over at Muddy Colors are heavily involved with crits and the judging......this is truly an amazing opportunity to learn something!!

In the sketches you will see that I played around with the fight scene of her and the Nazty fellow, but hit upon the helmet coming off and them about to get it on. 

In this photo, of the first sketch pages in my doodle book for this image, we see several stabs at establishing the fight sequence or moment of battle. The area of the red circle with the # 1 next to it is the initial idea the beginning point of where I started to play. The area with the # 2 is when I hit on the position I wanted for Eowyn.

 

Here is a closer view of our heroine.

Now that I had my girl, I needed to still find a way to get her and the Nazgul going at it.................

It then came to me to have him coming off the Fell Beast and jumping down on her, and here we can see that sort of happening in the top, and a refinement of the pose for him. Even tho in the text of the story, I believe it says the crown floats above him and that he has no head, I still sort of wanted to indicate him having a cranial region so I used the cape to sort of give that impression.

So now that I have my idea and my composition starting to come together........there is still something not quite right........and it turned out to be the way Eowyn is facing, so I flipped her around and then it was there.......

here is a close up of the little bitty sketch at the bottom right of the page.

Now I have my sketch and my idea I can begin to get it on the board and begin with the painting. I drew Eowyn directly onto the board from a more refined sketch of her that I hit upon while I was doodling away at his weaponry

.....for the Nazgul I then laid a piece tracing paper on the board to work him out after I drew the beast directly on the board as well.

In the next post I will show some of the in progress shots of the painting, but I am going to end here with just the shot of the image drawn onto my board .....