"Ents and Orcs" New 2023 Watercolors

Some of you may remember a project I started in 2012 called "Ents & Orcs," which was dedicated to both my love of gnarled old trees, and of JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. The project found its core inspiration in Tolkien's stories of the Ents and their battle against the orcs of Saruman. While he was often sparse on details about their conflicts, what he did say so intrigued me that is set in motion a series of paintings investigating what their feud may have looked like. After a while, the project drifted away from the core texts, and found their own lives, focusing on events that might have been happening in other forests in middle earth, as industry grew, and the last defenders of the forest fought back. 

At the end of 2012 I made a sketchbook where I collected a lot of the work from the series. Like so many of my early projects, the sketchbook is where the project stopped, because before I could carry on with it, some new opportunity arose, and I had to place this passion project on the back-burner. 

Recently though, the project has seen some new life and I had a chance to put a few new images together for a pitch. So today I am sharing a couple of watercolor studies from that with you, as well as a couple rough sketches of some battle scenes that might come next! 

The first little study is the "Fernlancer," a small fern warrior of the tree-herders.  Next is an Orc Maniac, which we started to paint on a recent Twitch livestream:    

This sturdy fellow decorates his armor with rusty old chainsaw parts, because festooning yourself with rusty shrapnel is what you do when your primary occupational hazard is being attacked by giant walking trees.

Both of these paintings were painted in traditional watercolor, instead of my usual pencil and digital. (This is why they have a more subdued palette and old school vibe compared to the Monster-of-the-Month series). While I can't give any more details about the project yet, I can say that I plan to keep the series very traditional-media focused, with black and white art in graphite and color paintings in watercolor. 

If I have time, I would like to do a couple full battle paintings in watercolor for the project. Possibly one of a goblin battling gnomes and forest sprites:

or possibly another of a lone Ent battling the Sawbiter Goblins amidst the ruins of a once-beautiful forest. 

Which of these two ideas would you want to see more as a painting? 

I am looking forward to seeing where this goes and sharing more with you as it develops! We WILL be doing more watercolors live on stream as well throughout the year, so those of you who are fans of traditional paint stay tuned for that!

-jg