as far as i know, there are only two known illustrations of elrond's house by tolkien himself, one from afar -- the famous watercolour from the hobbit -- and one up-close but very crude.

in both, it's surprising just how small the house looks in contrast to the text. so i was doodling one day and i tried to expand it just a bit.

and i ended up with...

a pagoda :P

for what it's worth, though, i like the concept.

not necessarily mount doom (well maybe it is, i dunno), just something from mordor. i think i did this when i was in a meeting that was boring me.

i sketched this years ago on a bus in seoul. i was at the time studying the hobbit with a friend's middle-school daughter i was tutoring. my drawing skills back then were much worse back then than they are now -- and they're still awful -- but i liked this. i thought there was some good atmosphere in it, and i liked the composition. i modeled it somewhat after tolkien's own drawings.

not very fond of this one. looks like sean penn. not that that's a bad thing. the drawing just isn't very good.

my favorite gandalf is bakshi's. he may look weird, but the voice and the sense of mystery are perfect. he feels not like a man, but like a god.

tolkien's description of the eye of sauron is very chilling, very haunting. couldn't be more different from peter jackson's sounds-like-a-freight-train-looks-like-hell version. tolkien himself illustrated the eye many times just as he described it:

"The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat's, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing."

chilling.

just a quick doodle. i really hated the look peter jackson gave the elves, it made me wanna puke. i could just smell the straight perm chemicals. and the clothes were overdone. i thought a simple kimono style might be fitting, so i scribbled it up. i like the concept.

this one i quite like. as with most of my sketches, done on the subway or bus (i can't remember) here in seoul. i think it captures boromir's valor and obstinance quite well. he's one of my favorite characters in the lord of the rings.

this was a total mistake. i was throwing away some old latex clay stuff recently, and i mashed a couple colors together. almost went in the trash bag, but then i saw that it looked like the earth or some planet a little. then i thought of the hand from this jrr tolkien picture called 'maddo' that was in the book tolkien: artist & illustrator, and i decided to try and make it holding the planet/globe, or whatever. all i had was yellow and red, but i like the way it turned out. was fun to make, but i had to keep resetting it every fifteen minutes for two days, which sucked. finally worked out, though.

i used to have the kermit one