amillustrated:SIlmarillion Book Cover In pretty much every example I’d seen of these two parti
amillustrated:SIlmarillion Book Cover In pretty much every example I’d seen of these two particular trees they were depicted as one being solid gold,and the other solid silver. To me this is odd. The text is pretty clear in its description.“Each tree was a source of light: Telperion’s silver and Laurelin’s gold. Telperion had dark leaves (silver on one side) and his silvery dew was collected as a source of water and of light. Laurelin had pale green leaves trimmed with gold, and her dew was likewise collected by Varda. One “day” lasted twelve hours. Each Tree, in turn, would give off light for seven hours (waxing to full brightness and then slowly waning again), so that at one hour each of “dawn” and “dusk” soft gold and silver light would be given off together.“ I decided to use magnolia trees as reference. They are all over Savannah, and the bottom of their leaves are a furry brown whereas the tops are green. After taking a few pictures on my phone and gathering a few pics off google I got to work drawing bunches of leaves.This is when I understood why people have traditionally not bothered to stick to the description. Excuse my french but its an ASSLOAD of work. Still I wanted to commit to this so over the course of a few days I added more and more, too away some, undid whole areas and went back in. The result was leaves that I was happy with. On the other hand suddenly the entire composition seemed to be in the same narrow value range. It was gold everywhere, you didnt know where to look and trying to focus almost hurt your eyes. I nearly dropped it at this point.But the show must go on. and so I kept on truckin. The solution here was to drastically alter the frame. I’ve gotten some critique suggestion that I actually turn back some of the contrast to try to unify the frame and the trees a little more. At the moment however I’m done with this. I feel like if I dont stop tinkering with it I’ll never move on. After I do my in sketches for the other Silmarillion illustrations I planned I’ll go back and decide if I need to make those changes. :EDIT:Fixed the Tolkien’s name…of all places to have a typo. smh -- source link