His Everything

As much as I love the fantasy genre, I'm getting sick of all the end-of-the-world battles. Seems that every fantasy series, even great ones like Lord of the Rings, is about the End Times, the Great Battle of Our Time, the World Will End if the Good Guys Lose, you get it. Come on guys, Armageddon can't happen every other day!!

My big challenge to all you would be Tolkeins , Weiss and Hickmans or whoever else is write a story in a fantasy world where it's just the day to day. In the fantasy world, elves live for hundreds, if not thousands of years. What is their day to day life compared to our real world of rush rush rush? Give me a story like that.

I don't believe fantasy only speaks to geeky kids who can't get girls. It should speak to all of us.

So here's my latest painting. I chose an Orc, the big warmongering monster in fantasy and tried to place him in human circumstances. What parent can't relate to the pride, love and hope that they have in their children? Their children are their whole worlds, and I tried to capture a bit of that very human experience in a monster.


Here's the color rough.


Here's the original drawing. Obviously, I decided to flip the piece halfway through. I believe this flows a bit better (Well, for us English speakers anyway. The Japanese probably think it's nuts.) This is the first one I've ever done in Sketchbook Pro. Very nice and easy program; I recommend it if you want to draw digitally without killing your computer's hard drive with memory hogging Adobe Photoshop.


And my reference. Yep. There's no dignity when it comes to photo reference. The scary elf is a leftover from my Fortunoff gig.

PS: I you want to leave a post saying I painted Shrek, DON'T.