Justin Gerard's The Hobbit

Justin Gerard is creating an impressive series of watercolor paintings on The Hobbit. His blog includes sketches, progress shoots, selected quotes and personal thoughts on the book. Completely self-motivated, these paintings have no destined book or other printed means.

Justin started the series as a means to recapture his own mental-images of the story and dive more deeply into traditional painting. Painting, he doesn't seem to have much trouble with, and I imagine he finds The Hobbit full of joy 'cause that's what these paintings are made of. If ever collected, it would be one of the most charming editions of the book.

"Like many people, when I read J.R.R. Tolkien's series I had all kinds of visual ideas in my own mind of what the characters, monsters and places looked like....And when the films were released I was jarred my first time seeing them. Things didn't look like they had in my head....Then something terrible happened.I found that I had lost my ideas. At first, they were only tainted by the films, but after a while I found that I had lost them altogether."

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