More Queen of Iophar

I tried again to portray the youthful Queen of Iophar from Lin Carter's "Flame of Iridar." I used a very thin technical pen point to re-create my 1977 drawings done in 4-0 Rapidograph. The pen's ink was a reddish brown which became too red when scanned, so I rendered my scan into simpler black and white. This is a tiny picture which I hoped would look better than my previous rendering of this graceful character, but I am not satisfied with it. Instead, she looks a bit like Paris Hilton. But since depicting beautiful women is essential to making sell-able fantasy art, I must continue trying. I can't do pictures of wine barrels and Victorian porches all the time. It's interesting, I can do portraits of real people fairly well but I fail when I try to depict these ideal women who are the mainstay of fantasy art. But like those Olympic advertisements I have been seeing again and again, I just need to have a Dream, keep trying, come back from my failures, make myself a new learning challenge every time, work, work, and more work, and all that neo-Protestant shit America believes in.

Queen of Iophar is ink on sketchbook page, 3" x 5", February 20, 2014.