Illustration Friday: Journey – The Road Goes Ever On and On

Finally finished my first go at an Illustration Friday subject in quite some time (yes, it’s Thursday, so I guess I’m kind of getting in under the wire). Late-ish though it may be, I’m extraordinarily pleased with the result this time around.

If you can remember as far back as Friday last week, Peter Jackson had just released the first of his video production diaries for The Hobbit, so The Hobbit was on my mind. And then the IF e-mail came into my inbox, with the subject Journey. The two things fell into place in my mind and I knew what I wanted to do:

Click to see troll-sized version

It is, of course, the very beginning of Bilbo Baggins’s journey, dashing down the road at Gandalf’s insistence, without a hat or a pocket handkerchief, to meet the Dwarves the morning after the Unexpected Party, and the very end, returning to Bag End wealthier, wiser and more wordly.

I think it kind of works as a cover for the book:

Click to see second-breakfast-sized version

I had to look at a lot of photo reference to draw the pony and I gotta say: ponies are damn weird-looking creatures, man.

The illustration is entirely digital, executed in Adobe Photoshop CS4 as two separate panels, then put together and combined with the typographic treatment (for both the “standard” version and the book cover version) in Illustrator.

Thanks for stopping by!