Lord of the Rings: Illustrations

As promised, here are my LOTR Illustrations...or at least, the ones I don't mind people seeing.
(Note: These are all acrylic...unless otherwise noted.)

Prologue Battle: Mordor
Peter Jackson wanted to know what 600,000 troops, battling on the plains of Mordor, would look like.





Bree
The Hobits enter the town of Bree. Design for a matte Painting.



Waiting Ring Wraith
An obvious homage to Frank Frazeta. Peter was just about to shoot the Bree sequence, and he wanted an image of a Ring Wraith to show the crew, so they would have an idea of what these characters were. Unfortunately, I could never get the horse to look like anything other than a dumpy mule. Not my best painting.



Wraith World
I was assigned the task of figuring out what it would look like when Frodo put The Ring on. After several failed attempts, I finally came up with this image.

We shot 5 Wraiths in costume and full makeup, one at a time in front of a bluescreen. I then composited all of them together, removed all their color, and distorted the snot out of them in Photoshop. Lastly, I painted in lots of wispy streaky stuff, and voilà...Wraith World.



Rivendell
Alan Lee had already designed the individual Rivendell buildings...my task was to try to put them into an environment. If you're questioning the perspective in this painting (or lack thereof), the idea is that it was to represent a 180 degree pan. (Imagine the painting wrapped around your head.)



The painting works a little better if you crop in on it, and only look at small sections.







Orthank Tower (aka The Moth Shot)



Lothlorien
Once again, Alan Lee's architecture...my composition and lighting. (And for those of you who make the inevitable comparison between this, and the Ewok Village, I'll ask you to remember which story was written first.)



Now, if you compare it to the Gungin city...I might not be able to come up with a snappy comeback:)



Helms Deep



The Glittering Caves
In the story, these caves were behind Helms Deep. In fact, Helms Deep was built to guard the caves, which were filled with precious gems.
Originally in the script, Film 3 started out with a romantic scene between Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) and Arwen (Liv Tyler) in this cave. Liv was to be swimming naked in the pool. The intent was to shoot her with lots of reflections on the surface of the water, to hide all the naughty bits. I of course designed the pool to be lit from below, thus canceling out the reflections and clearly illuminating anything that was in the water. Was that wrong of me? :)
Unfortunately, the entire sequence was cut. No, it was never shot.



Fangorn Forest
Of all the paintings I did for the LOTR films, this one is my favorite.



This was the final design for the location. It's a digital paint-over, on top of the previous painting.



Hennuth Annun Falls
Not my favorite set piece in the films. It looked like it was shot on a sound stage to me...which it was.



Mordor



Barad-Dur
This is a digital composite. The tower is a Miniature; some of the sky is a photo I took; the rest is painted.



Mt. Doom Erupting (Digital)



Elven Boat - Grey Havens



Grey Havens Sketch (Digital)