A friend of one of my clients wished to commission a piece because she had seen my art in her collection and admired it. She wanted a Tolkien piece, and I offered a twist; the Elves were to be Black. There is no rule against multi-racial elves. The painting was done of two very tall and elegant Black elves, a man and a woman, dressed in grey and light green, watching in refined horror as Frodo, the small, stocky Hobbit, shows them the fateful Ring. The background is the Yellow Forest of Tolkien's elves; it was painted just as leaves were sprouting on the spring trees, and is that special green-gold color. Iridescent paints were used for the green border and the purple sheen around the Ring. The male elf was based on the appearance of famous basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Nowadays the "black" elves are represented by the "drow" or "Dark Elves" who have blue-black skin and pure white hair, not much like human coloring at all.
"Frodo and the Black Elves" is acrylic on illustration board, 11" x 14" June 1986. Click for larger view.
2 comments:
I’m not going to say your art is trash, it isn’t, it’s actually quite well executed, very reminiscent of the art style of the old editions of the books, but I will correct you, kind of. There is no “rule” as such against multi racial elves, but Tolkien constantly describes almost every elf as “fair” now fair could mean beautiful, but he also describes them as fair skinned, and in old common parlance, light skinned was beautiful, therefore saying someone was fair had the dual meaning of beauty and light skinned.
Great art, very nice, I just don’t think there were black elves
Ahh, but that's the wonderful part of this piece: the interpretation of a fantasy trope. It's not something that comes up in most fantasy art, and the artist decided to try a new angle. Very well executed.
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