Tolkien Etchings

Charcoal and Compressed Charcoal on Rives BFK

30 x 22 inches

My latest drawing is from Tolkien’s most recently published book, “The Children of Hurin”, and depicts Turin Turambar, with the sword Gurthang, (originally known as Anglachel), slaying the lord of the fire-breathing dragons Glaurung, in the narrow chasm of the Teiglin river. Compositionally this was a difficult picture. The dragon being rather a long bodied creature tends to make one think that a horizontal composition is best. But when I laid it out this way, Turin being, of course, much smaller than Glaurung, becomes so tiny that no real details can be shown of him. This is because a human figure is essentially a vertical form, and when the page is horizontal, with the very large form of a dragon at the top, there is left very little height for the figure. I made a good many sketches attempting to solve this problem. My breakthrough came when I realized that I could orient the page vertically if I used a worms-eye point of view. By doing this, Turin could be drawn large enough to give him facial detail (which was very important to me), and also Glaurung shown in his, correctly, much larger proportion to Turin. This is because, being higher in the composition, the dragon is now much farther from the observer’s point of view, and therefore visually smaller than he would be if he where at the same level as Turin. Also giving Glaurung an extremely arched back, as he is “feeling his death-pang”, allowed me to depict almost all of his body.