Turin sketch

It's been a long time since I posted anything for my Weekly Tolkien Sketchblog, I've been spending alot of time working on my technique in various media, trying to up my game artistically for this middle-earth historic costume in pictures book I hope to make. The above sketch is one of the more humble fruits of that endeavor.

This started life as a pen sketch of Aragorn (and really for all intents and purposes it could still be him, the descendents of the Beorian line all look somewhat similar in my mind) and as an opportunity to experiment mixing pointillism with hatching techniques, but sometime around rendering that heavy stubble it came to be Turin; humanity is in it's infancy in Turin's time, being no more than a few hundred years old as a species, and as with my recent take on Haleth and her guardswomen it was important to me that these early humans (especially a great, natural born hero like Turin) should have a real roughness and unrefined savageness to them. at the same time, they should appear intensely virile and even somewhat superhuman; they have a 'bigness' to them, as if in their faces and bodies you can feel all the seed of humanity yet to come, like Michelangelo's Adam and Eve. Turin, furthermore, is described as being the most beautiful of all the sons of men in the elder days, and I hoped to convey that as well, but in a six-and-a-half-foot-tall, conan-like ass kicker kind of way. Really a large part of my thinking on this portrait was to build a face for him that could reasonably be found under the dragon helm in this great drawing by my friend Artigas

oh and that's an orc arm underneath, come floating in to join the party