All Artwork and Music ©Copyright 2007 by Douglas Christian Larsen
This page will include updates to The Tolkster Progress...
It is not generally known that J.R.R. Tolkien was chiefly instrumental in Clive Staple Lewis' conversion to Christianity. Without Tolkien, there never would have been a Narnia! It was on a famous long walk that Tolkien related his reasons for believing, answering and gently arguing with Lewis, all the atheistic queries and objections, and at the conclusion of the walk, C.S. Lewis was a believer, or at least well on his way! If you've never read Lewis' Mere Christianity, you owe yourself a treat, wherein many of those answers and dynamic thoughts are provided, answers to those questions asked on that long, long walk, a walk which yet goes on, leading into eternity.
"Courage
is found
in unlikely
places."
- J.R.R. Tolkien
“All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renenwed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king.”
- J.R.R. Tolkien
A Few Technical Type Notes:
The hair. I put off tackling the hair until almost everything else was pretty much settled, and I attempted about five different techniques to try and capture Tolkien's beautiful head of thick hair, but almost everything I did made him look like a glorious ancient hippy, and so I have had to go back to pretty much the standard Virtual Shattered Glass (VSG) technique, just not as fine as the face (but fairly close, and so his hair is almost as time-consuming as his face, for instance, in the 02/07/07 update, that wee bit of completed hair represents about 30 hours of work, compared to the ear which blasted away about 40 hours).
Note, I also spent about five hours to give Tolkien a magical, animated pipe on the opening page, all due to the wish-list hint of a good friend, and I kind of like the way it turned out!
Fine Art Poster: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
The Tolkster Theme
"It's a job that's never started that takes the longest to finish."
- J.R.R. Tolkien
"All we have to decide
is what to do with the time
that is given to us."
- J.R.R. Tolkien
"The Tolkster" is the 6-month fine-art project
in homage to John Ronald Reuel Tolkien,
author of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.
The Fine-Art Poster is now available at
extremely affordable values, framed, matted,
and on long-lived papers and canvas.