Who wist no sire

Happy International Don't Stab Your Best Friend Day!

Apologies for this being posted so late. IDSYBFD sneaked up on me this year like an elf on a rescue mission and I didn't remember about it until I saw all you wonderful people reblogging my previous years' posts. And then my tablet's stylus battery gave out five minutes into drawing, and right after I finished charging the stylus the tablet quit as well. We're lucky that I even managed to finish it before midnight in my current time zone.

This is my last scheduled content post before my hiatus.  I thought to make a proper goodbye I’d share your favorite thing (Third Age Finrod) and my favorite thing (Beleg and Túrin).

I wonder how long it took for him to remember to tell Galadriel that he was back in Middle Earth.

I finally had a chance to take photos in the Beleg costume I’ve been working on for over a year.  It’s not quite finished but I decided enough of it was ready for a photoshoot.  And shush, I know Túrin is supposed to have black hair, but I don’t know anyone who is taller than me and has black hair (and has read the Silmarillion), so I figured the lighter hair could slide since my Túrin here is tall and has read the Silm.  (In hindsight, I suppose we could have tried to find a wig...but whatever.  He grew his hair out for this photoshoot and a wig would have meant he wasted all that time and effort.)  While we’re being picky about hair though, I wish mine had been a bit longer at the time we were taking the photos because even after like two years of growing it out this is all I’ve got.

Anyway, enough about the pictures.  I know I’ve already said this multiple times, but one more time won’t hurt: thanks to all of you so much for your support throughout my time on Tumblr, and thanks for understanding my desire to take a break.  Throughout my whole time here you’ve been so much more encouraging and positive than I could ever have expected or hoped (there are over 700 of you now, which is about 100 times what I anticipated when I started out), and because of that it truly was hard for me to make the decision to take this break.  I’m going to miss you while I’m gone, and I look forward to the times I come back to post a surprise drawing or two.  As I’ve mentioned before, I won’t be deleting the blog, especially since I cautiously hope to maybe come back to Tumblr long-term again someday and it would be much easier if I’m returning to a blog with content and followers and a familiar URL and etc.  So yeah, if any of you decide to stick around you’ll know if/when that happens.

The other day as I was going through the blog’s backup folders, I found some old drawings that I meant to post throughout the past couple of years and either forgot about or just never got around to (I don’t think there are any here that I’ve posted before, but I apologize if there are).  And I thought “I should probably post these before I go.”  So here they are.  I’m going to put them under a cut because there are quite a few of them.  Most of them are from Children of Húrin.

Thanks so much, Verecunda!  I’m going to miss your reblogs.  Your tags always make my day.  And speaking of CoH, maybe you’ll be glad to hear that that’s most of what I have set up for this week’s queue.

After I answered that ask about my thoughts on autistic Beleg and Túrin, a couple of people took the bait and asked about my headcanons (as opposed to just the reasons I interpret them as autistic).  And of course I am always delighted to share headcanons.  Be aware that a few of them here and there will overlap with things I mentioned in the other post, so I’m apologizing in advance for any redundancy; but aside from those, please bear in mind that most of the things on this list are just my own original ideas with absolutely no direct supporting evidence from canon.  If you want canon stuff instead, you’d be happier reading the other post.  But for those who don’t mind me taking a bit of artistic license with the characters, the headcanons are under the cut.

I realized I have enough stuff saved up to post something every day until the end of the month.  So that’s what we’re going to do, I think.  Give ourselves a full week of posts like the early days of the blog, just for old time’s sake, before I have to go.  To kick off this last hurrah, here’s a drawing of Beleg that I promised to whomever could track down the source of a particular quote, and it turned out to be @thegreatstrongbow who found the quote.  So that could hardly have been more perfect.

Wow, I can't tell you how valued this made me feel.  I hope I'll be back eventually because getting feedback on my art and comics and character designs has been so rewarding and I love making things that other people love because then everybody wins.

Since I didn’t alreadyhave a drawing ready to post today and I only had a few hours to come up with something, I decided to redraw a photo I had from last week.  It’s been a while since I did any digital art, so a slightly modified photo study seemed like a good way to get back into practice.

I introduced the Messenger in my last post.  So here’s approximately how things went down for him when I first read the Silmarillion:

Beleg, afterwards, sarcastically: “Wow, good job, Túrin.”

At what point do you think Túrin got too heavy for Beleg to pick up anymore?  Because it definitely 100% happened.

And in case anyone doubts this fact:

That was even with two of them working together and I don’t care if Gwindor only had one hand, the weight would still have been better distributed than if Beleg was trying to do it alone.  And elves are no weaklings for their size either, so Tolkien apparently included this to make very sure that we knew Túrin weighs way more than he has any right to.  Heavy was the doom that lay on him, ha.  More like heavy was the man himself.

Lass uns zieh’n, Seelenbruder! Mit dem Winde singen wir das Lied der Zeit. Lass uns zieh’n, Seelenbruder! Mit den Wolken lass uns fliegen hoch und weit. Seelenbruder, sing mit mir das Lied der Zeit.

I’m always taking pictures of locations and saying “I should use this for drawing practice!” and then I never do, but this time I did and I’m very proud of myself for actually sticking to the reference picture for at least 75% of this one.

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the “good responses to being stabbed with a sword” post, so...

(In case anyone is relatively new here and doesn’t recognize my designs for the characters, from the top that’s Finrod, Túrin, Beleg, and Maeglin., who all happen to be among my top ten favorite Tolkien characters.)

Bonus post to wish everybody a happy April Fool’s Day!  I thought about making a super dumb or shocking post and then revealing it was all a joke later on, but settled for just changing my profile picture and banner.  No worries, I’ll be changing them back eventually (probably).

Before anyone asks, the profile picture is from this comic my best friend drew, and the banner is a reference to guitar Beleg, which is an inside joke but I’ve had a couple of posts here about it so I thought it would be funny to include something about it.  Also here’s a comic.