Eagles Soaring Toward Minas Tirith Through the Mist — Print & Oil Painting

This is watercolour and ink, and it is worth knowing because the technique explains the picture. All the mist here is bare paper: the white was never painted, it was left, and the rock has been washed in around it in transparent greys. Ink lines are added on top, dry and scratchy, only where an edge actually needs to be stated.

The viewpoint is airborne. We are level with the birds and well above the valley floor, looking down a gorge whose walls rise in dark crags at both edges and along the whole bottom of the frame, with cloud pouring between them. There is no ground under the viewer at all.

Three eagles carry the depth. The nearest is large, gliding left across the centre with both wings fully extended and every primary feather separated, its head lowered. A second, half the size, follows a little above and behind. A third is smaller still and nearly lost in the haze at the right. Nothing else establishes the distance across the gorge.

The city is small, pale and a long way off. It stands on a green shelf in the middle distance, built up in tiers of white stone with one tall slender tower rising clear of the rest, and it sits inside a ring of snow peaks that closes behind it across the top of the sheet. It has been painted with a fine brush and almost no ink, so it stays luminous while everything nearer is dark.

Eagles in these stories arrive from outside the problem, are never summoned by anyone who needs them, and leave as soon as they have finished. Painting them mid-flight with the destination still far off is truer to that than painting an arrival would be. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, alongside the same birds in a fight and the greatest of them carrying a passenger.