Gandalf - The Bridge of Khazad-dûm

This was my third entry for GD UK - it was a finalist but missed out on the trophies hehe...congratulations again to Julien C for his amazing Galadriel that won the gold! I also entered it at Italy GD but missed out on winning anything there as well hehe ;) I was inspired to paint this Gandalf after looking at the incredible version by David Rodriguez (Karaikal) - seeing his made me want to paint my own version, so it is a sort of tribute to him :D It is such an amazing scene in the LOTR movie, and I tried to create a similar dramatic effect by having a strong contrast between the intense, cold light coming from the top of Gandalf's staff, against the warm but very faint orange-red ambient glow of the environment. Perhaps I should have used a dark background for the photos, to try to give more realism to the scene :) Well I hope you like it! There will be more and larger photos on my website very soon.

Posted: 3 Nov 2007

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8 comments

fieldarchy
Ahh Gandalf, my favorite LOTR character of all time. Seb you did him justice my friend. I love the colors, so simple a scheme and so nicely painted!
16 Apr 2008 • Vote: 9
Avelorn
Overall it's great! But I can actually see an area of improvement in the painting on this one, and that's the face. It doesn't look quite right. Now let me see if this comes out understandable. When you use the multiple glazes variant of highlighting one problem can be small details as the highlights doesn't become sharp enough, you drag around just a bit too large drop of paint so to speak. And that goes for facial features as well. What the face needs is a bit of sharpness, definting lines. One tutorial that I've found very useful is that one of Jaume Ortiz when he describes painting faces, if you haven't seen that one try reading it. And don't bother so much about transitions at this scale in faces, maybe that's what holding you back on this one? You can try as in the tutorial to put out all the colours and light very sharp and then use intermediary glazes to smoothen them out later. Hope the criticism is useful. :) All the best, Sven
22 Nov 2007
Trovarion
what did you expect in Italy, it had no freehand ^^ Great work, It's not easy to do something with this model that hasn't been there already.
10 Nov 2007 • Vote: 10
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