Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Dragonflight over Chaos


This is a very early work of mine, based on a passage from one of Michael Moorcock's "Elric" tales. In this scene, Elric rides a flying dragon over a landscape that has turned to Chaos. The Earth, in these stories, is degenerating into Chaos - an indiscriminate stew of biological, geological, and human-made materials - which can no longer support any sort of organization. (These stories were originally written in the 1960s.) 

I was using my European pen, with its ultra-thin point, for this drawing, and in order to see the details in it you need to click on the picture. It doesn't quite hold together as a visual scene and I never colored it in. Elric's dragon is an odd-looking thing which looks more like a flying turtle than a proper dragon. I was influenced by the trippy art of British illustrator Patrick Woodroffe when creating this piece.

"Dragonflight over Chaos" is brown technical pen ink on watercolor paper, 14" x 10", winter 1976. At the time, I was a miserable graduate student in Greek and Latin classics.

1 comment:

Tristan Alexander said...

Very interesting, I think I like it. The fee is right for the scene even if I cannot make out details very well. I adore the works of Patrick Woodroffe, I have several books of his stuff.