Victoria Clare’s Art

I drew some D&D Locathah. The official Locathah art makes this people look like a kind of catfish, but I decided it would be fun if my Locathah were based on the sailfin, or armoured catfish (or ‘plecos’ – the kind people keep in tanks). So my Locathah are covered in spots and have sucker-faces.

The real life sailfin catfish uses a modified stomach to ‘breathe’ with, allowing it to live out of the water for up to 20 hours. This is better than the fictional Locathah can do: Locathah generally need to return to the water after 4 hours, according to my copy of “Ghosts of Saltmarsh”.

Sailfin catfish can walk on land, at up to 2.3 mph, and their unique gait is called ‘reffling’.

However, they are freshwater fish, so probably not suitable for a saltmarsh environment. I might need to draw some more maritime catfish Locathah!

Some years ago we decided on the conceit that the Shop on the Borderlands packing was done by orcs.  (really, it’s done by me & PP, but orcs seemed more on brand.  So each year since, I have drawn the orcs doing something vaguely festive, and here they are again.

These are not Tolkieny orcs – or at least, they don’t reflect the popular ‘once elves’ origin story of Tolkien orcs. They are old-school pigfaced orcs, creatures of very little refinement but apparently a great appreciation of Christmas Jumpers.

I’ve been watching the new Amazon Rings of Power series, and I was taken with the character of Arondir, the stern-faced Silvan elf soldier who is captured by orcs.  One detail mentioned about him is that he was born in Beleriand, so I thought I’d paint a few pictures of him growing up there.

The last image is of the war that brought an end to Beleriand and Arondir’s home.

Made a couple of images to illustrate that blink-and-you-missed-the-mention period in the early Third Age when Gondor conquered the South and East, and Harad paid tribute and had to send their young princes to live in Gondor as hostages.

Tribute to Gondor

I made this for the Scribbles and Drabbles 2022 event by @fall-for-tolkien on Tumblr and it came out better than expected, so I ended up doing more detail than I’d originally thought.

I also made this one, which is more of a scribble, really!  It’s called Cats! Gorgumoth, and it’s a drawing of the Halls of Mandos, with the Hound of Mandos perhaps rather unusually portrayed as a Yorkshire Terrier.  I am convinced that the Halls of Mandos, where dead elves go, are full of cats, walking through the walls and generally refusing to get involved with the usual laws of physics.

Here’s a little watercolour of Elf prince Fingon from the Silmarillion riding, as an excuse to post a link to a charity auction to raise money for organisations working on the war in Ukraine.   I’m donating a custom artwork to be made just for the winning bidder!

Details here: https://sunflower-auction.dreamwidth.org/13065.html – the auction ends May 30th!  Please bid.

At the very end of The Lord of the Rings, there’s a tantalising mention that when Legolas sailed into the West, he took his friend Gimli with him.

I imagined them in the West beyond the Sea, meeting Aulë, the creator of the Dwarves in Tolkien’s legendarium, and Yavanna, creator of the Ents and effectively Tolkien’s nature goddess archetype.

This is a little A5 watercolour picture, I’m quite pleased with how much detail there is in it!

Most unusually, since we moved to Wales, so has someone else, a wandering Walrus, who has been dubbed Wally.  I saw him a few weeks ago, quite randomly on a visit to Tenby.  A passing walker said to us as we admired the view: “Have you seen the Walrus?”  And there he was!

By coincidence, the Silmarillion Writer’s Guild challenge of the month was ‘Words of Wit and Wisdom’ – focussing on the words that Tolkien worked on for the Oxford English Dictionary, one of which was Walrus.  I did some drawing for some of the works:

First, this for Words for Wally, the Wandering Walrus of Wales:  a poem by Wander.

The Walrus that Went South, by Himring