The Lieutenant of the Black Gate
1979
Originally done as a school project, I actually cut the figure out and glued it onto the background.
I find it hard to believe that the whole thing is still intact.
It is actually my first piece of Tolkien-related work to be published, appearing in the 1987 Tolkien Calendar with a somewhat startling green background and on the video game from those crooks at Melbourne House, where my weird two-headed crucified crow (what kind of creepy student was I? Small wonder I spent the third year in the stairwell...) was rendered in a rather smarter fashion.
I had originally labelled this image "The Lieutenant of the Black Gate", but very recently stumbled on my notes ( which fill the margins of my dog-eared, heavily annotated copies of The Lord of the Rings that I had in art school) and now realize that it was the Witch King that I had in mind while doing it.
Consistency has never been one of my strong points... |
