Or looking straight into this light through the bars, just as shadowy figures in the background are getting ready to torture him again, with desperate longing/grim determination/deep sadness/dark desperation/ Feanorean fury/ bitter regret/all of these/some of these – take your pickĪfter what you’ve been doing to him, you owe him this – a single spark, a ray of light in complete darkness. Draw him defiant: bloodied, bruised and battered, but still able to look Morgoth in the eye, with the light of the Silmarills from the iron crown falling on his face, and say ‘no’, knowing what it will cost him. Show us that Feanorean spark that kept him alive, sane and unbroken through years of torment. Well, I’ve been thinking… You keep drawing Maedhros in moments of complete surrender. (Un)fortunately I can’t draw, but I have truckloads of ideas, ready to be dumped at unsuspecting artists’ doorsteps -) So, one interesting lighting situation lost to painting delirium. It would have destroyed much of the detail work. I debated putting it in, and tried around with what it would look like digitally, but there were two reasons to get rid of it: Firstly, it somehow looked like a ray of hope – which I did not want there, and secondly, the paper wouldn’t have taken another layer of paint across the entire pic. The light-through-bars lighting got lost in the process. Yesterday I sat down with a bottle of coke and my paints and just painted… got myself a new bottle around midnight – came back to my desk with it and actually flinched at what I found there somehow, and couldn’t quite explain how it had got there.

I used to do this all the time when I was younger – sitting down with a bottle of coke and my paints, and emerging four to eight hours later with a finished painting that I couldn’t remember even thinking about.

Skills angband