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Smaug sketches

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Couple of quick sketches for a painting (famous last words, i know) i think it'd be fun to do a picture of bilbo coming upon smaug slumbering on his gold pile that follows tolkien's own watercolor of the scene, ala several of ted nasmith's paintings.

smaug is described like any great dragon from ancient mythology, but, rereading this part of The Hobbit yesterday, what struck me is that the scene is written with a very victorian-fairy-tale feel to it. for one thing, compositionally, smaug is actually the light source in the scene; far from the 'movie dragons' strategy of making dragons more or less biologically plausible creatures who happen to be able to breathe fire, tolkien describes Smaug like a living copper brazier, always smouldering, even if only on a very low burn most of the time (his earliest writings on the siege of gondolin feature dragons that are essentially biomechanical) and while I loved everything about the movie's design for smaug and I dont really think jackson & co could have done him any better for film purposes (and while, needless to say this drawing is heavily indebted to their brilliant work) the character, as i read him on the page and see him in my mind's eye, will always have that fleshless, crocodilian mouth structure (try to get that to talk convincingly :P) it just seems more fairy tale-like, making no concessions to the requirement to make something that looks and moves believeably (also, for the same reasons, i've reinstated the character's front limbs, idiotic from an anatomical standpoint, but a staple of the fairy tale dragon)
Image size
2040x2572px 1.58 MB
Make
Canon
Model
Canon MX890 series Network
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JeantineHobbit's avatar
When I read The Hobbit I actually imagined Smaug as speaking slowly and menacingly with the voice if Colm Feore's Laufey. It's actually pretty similar to Shenron, only faster! :)