Thorin son of Thrain

Again, fantastic work. Of the two schools of dwarven thought i fall more towards the second camp as epitomised by Gimli in the film (although arguably exemplified by the dwarf kings of LotR's prologue). Dwarves occupy the opposite end of the spectrum of humanoid appearances to elves- they're heavy and blunt where elves are light and fine- it'd be unnatural to have a 'cute' or 'pretty' dwarf really. Apparently when designing the make-up for Kili they found that any more prosthetics than the bare minimum made him look 'thuggish' but i can't help thinking that that is probably what a young dwarf would look- they're like rugby players- pretty brutal and intimidating but as a rule unfailingly nice. While i wouldn't go quite as far as to say the dwarves should have been puppets, i think that the heavy prosthetics used on John Rhys Davies and others did help establish a very distinctive race, particularly with the broader face. I actually think that with characters like the dwarves, when you limit the prosthetics (as they did with The Hobbit where Peter Jackson decided not to burden his actors with prosthetics on the lower face) it actually ends up looking rather odd and 'off' such as with the change in look on Filius Flitwick in the Harry Potter films [link] - maybe it's just the unfortunate haircut and dodgy tash, but the 'refined' Flitwick looks kind of creeepy. Likewise Jackson's halfway house failed to sell the illusion of the dwarves being a separate race and instead ended up looking like humans in silly oversized costumes and big rubber noses.