Amdall Gallery

In the comments of an Instagram post I made on my last sketch (Fezzik and Inigo from the Princess Bride), one of my longtime friends responded with “Sam and Frodo.” This comment was pretty exciting, because I thought it was a request for another sketch! As it turns out, he was joking (which should have been obvious in hindsight), but I already had in my mind to move forward with it. I responded by saying that I would do a sketch featuring the true hero of Lord of the Rings, Samwise, carrying that lazy hobbit Frodo up a volcano. And so that’s exactly what I decided to draw!

Once I realized this wasn’t a real request, it definitely loosened me up a bit. In fact, as I was drawing this scene, I approached it at first mostly as a joke. I even planned to draw in a caption about Frodo being a slacker. I modified the caption plan as the sketch proceeded, because I liked how it was turning out and didn’t want to mess it up with a speech bubble. I added good ol’ Gollum/Smeagol peeking out from behind a rock, and reserved some space for a digitally-added speech bubble for whatever lame joke I wanted to add. I’m going to post this ridiculousness to Instagram as the “fulfilled request.”

For what started as a joke drawing, this one really did work out well. At first, I thought I wasn’t going to be able to capture Sean Astin’s Samwise accurately. I think it does actually look like him for the most part. The angle didn’t really leave much room to show Frodo’s face, so we can just assume that he does look like Elijah Wood. My Gollum doesn’t look much like the Andy Serkis CJI Smeagol from the actual movie, but I’m actually okay with that; I think it’s still obvious who that’s supposed to be.

Although the Gollum speech bubble version is top billing in this post, I also wanted to include the original drawing without the comic relief. Clearly, it loses some “umph” without some commentary on Frodo’s laziness. (Update: I cleaned up the photo with a reshoot, but unfortunately I’m a bit too lazy to go back and add the speech bubbles). Here’s the unedited one:

Also, this time I only remembered to take one progression photo. I think this is mostly because I moved sort of quickly on this one. Here’s the only progression image I have, which was just after laying down some shadows, but prior to any blending:

So, that’s all for my semi-request Lord of the Rings sketch! I have no clue what’s next, but the weekend is here, so I’m sure something will come up.