Pity and Mercy

Sméagol

Efemera from UK Stampers says:

"This week's prompt is BOOKS

1 List your top five books...what and why?

2 Use a quote from one of them on your page

3 Use an old book page as your background"

I imagine my favourite book to be a favourite of quite a few people.  'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy by J R R Tolkien is such a hugely rich book in terms of characters and environments that you almost can't imagine that it is a work of fiction.  It feels so real you can almost feel the pages of the book breathing and I feel equally passionate about the Hugh Jackman movies.  The other books I chose, I chose for similar reasons.  The 'Harry Potter' series by J K Rowling, 'The Liveship Traders' trilogy by Robin Hobb and the 'Dragonlance Chronicles' by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman all have wonderful fantasy backgrounds against which important stories, that might otherwise be too cruel, can be read by adults and by children also.  I have added 'The Unlikely Ones' by Mary Brown as this is the first fantasy novel I read, at about nine or ten and I still own the book.  My mother liked the beautifully drawn cover and I was drawn in by tales of sickly dragons, disabled heroes and heroines and a knight in rusting armour.  

If I could have added more books, I would have dipped into my other favourite genres:

Horror and ghost stories - 'The Stand' by Stephen King and works by H P Lovecraft and Henry James

Sci-fi - 'The Player of Games' by Iain M Banks

Short stories - Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl and just about EVERYTHING that Daphne du Maurier has ever written

Anyways, back to journalling.  I couldn't bare to part with a single page of any of my books, so I took a photograph of a page from The Two Towers and printed it out.  I drew Sméagol/Gollum having looked at some of the pictures on the internet and coloured him with Letraset Tria markers and Steadtler triplus fineliners, discovering as I did so that I could do with a wider selection of skin tones.  I should have started using coloured pencils at that stage, but I didn't want to change the texture/look of the drawing.  The quote is one of my favourites in the book, forcing the reader to examine their own feelings towards Gollum, who was once Sméagol, and remains a creature still worthy of pity and mercy.

I filled in the names and authors of the other books around the drawing.  I could have been neater, but against the typeface, I wanted a slightly more "scruffy" look.  Lastly, I doodled lines in similar colours to the background paper, to make the quotes, title, image and background paper more unified.

Ingredients for Pity and Mercy

Background paper - free with magazine

Staedtler pigment liner 03

Pentel Chinese Calligraphy brush pen

Pentel white gel pen

Staedtler triplus fineliners: light grey, dark grey

Letraset Metallic markers: silver, red gold

Letraset Tria markers: whites WG07 and WG10, skin tones O518, O618, O527, pink R327, brown O225, blues C555, C919, B138, raspberry R354, green G356, black XB