Howdo all. So it's been 15 years since the last post regards the LOTR art prints here. Wonder if you will get a ping in your mailbox that someone has replied?
Anyhow, do people still have their original purchases? What are they worth now? any plans on selling?
Found this on John Howe's website for anyone who still has the Barad-dur print:
I was very happy with the way this came out, considering how hard it is to obtain a decent print, even when you are perched like some vigilant harpy on the printer's shoulder. Considering this was a transworld bit of collaboration - the printers in the U.S., me here, the original in Wellington, and naught but files and photoshop scripts to tie it all together, it worked out extremely well (and I'm not just saying that to flog more prints).
I even came up with a few words about the picture, but Sideshow wasn't able to fit them all in, so here they are:
Mordor is more than just a blighted landscape, it is an extension of Sauron's gangrened and avaricious soul. Every element of the land - the Dark Tower, Mount Doom, the Black Gates, Cirith Ungol, Minas Morgul, must manifest in some way the architecture of darkness and evil. The Gorgoroth itself is more than a parched plain, it is as if a storm-wracked sea suddenly solidified into stone, pitted and decayed but honed razor-sharp over time by the very negation of life the Dark Lord represents. Barad-dur's very foundations are anchored in the folly of Sauron, his wrath embodied in battlement piled on battlement, his power the mortar that holds stone to stone to impossible heights. The air itself is poisoned by his breath, and the livid sky is torn by the cries of his servants, the ground shakes with the iron shod tread of his armies. The land itself is in his image.
Can you put all this in one illustration? Of course not. And besides, film directors are all the same, they want you to combine close-up in a wide shot with three different dramas all in one. The image started off fairly simply. "It would be great to capture the vertiginous impossible nature of Barad-dur, but then of course a shot at the Red Eye wouldn't hurt would it, and while the background is still damp, how about squeezing in mount Doom? Oh yes, and a Nazgul or two would be nice while you're at it. And don't forget, lots of smoke, didn't I mention that the Ring had just fallen into the crack of Doom?" Directors...
(
John Howe)
