This rather old-fashioned drawing is an illustration for one of the "Lythande Wizard" stories of Marion Zimmer Bradley. I did it for "Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine," which always featured at least one story by her in each issue. This story starred the female-to-male cross-dressing wizard, "Lythande." She was compelled to wear men's clothing and pass as a man as the price of sneaking into an all-male wizards' academy dressed as a man.
This story was called "The Wuzzles," and was about a village that had been invaded by magical, grain-eating fuzzballs, similar to Tribbles, called "Wuzzles." Wuzzles could only be defeated by magic, but the wizard Lythande was allergic to the magic and couldn't use it without a counter-charm. That, in my memory, was provided by a young male herbalist who later pairs up with the buxom girl you see in the background.
This illustration has a lot of inkwork in it, all done by hand before any computers could do such things.
Black ink on illustration board, 9" x 11", September 1991. Click for a somewhat larger view.
1 comment:
I really like this piece. The angle, shadow and light, the fine details and crosshatching technique.
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