Chris Howard's Blog, page 56
October 9, 2018
October’s With Painted Words is live! I painted this one,...
October’s With Painted Words is live! I painted this one, “Mine!”, a few weeks ago, 5 hours in Art Rage 5.
October 8, 2018
October 7, 2018
Chloe got a shot of the SpaceX Falcon9-Block5 launch out of...
Chloe got a shot of the SpaceX Falcon9-Block5 launch out of Vandenberg Air Force Base. SpaceX launched Argentina’s new SAOCOM 1A radar observation satellite. More info here:https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/10/07...
October 5, 2018
October 3, 2018
DISCWORLD CHARACTER STUDIES–The first seven!I painted all...
DISCWORLD CHARACTER STUDIES–The first seven!
I painted all of these in Art Rage 5 and Photoshop CC. Each one took 4-5 hours to draw and then paint. I use a Wacom Intuos 4 tablet and UGEE 2150 graphics display table. More of stuff here: https://SaltwaterWitch.com
Sergeant Angua of the Ankh Morpork City Watch. She’s one of my favorite characters in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books. Delphine Angua von Überwald is the only werewolf in the Watch–that we know of. She’s the independent one in the family–the sons and daughters of Baron Guye von Überwald and Serafine Soxe-Bloonberg of Genua (both werewolves), and the only one with the will to break free from the family tyranny and head to Ankh-Morpork. We first meet Angua in Men at Arms, where she’s learning to adjust to the culture, sights, of smells of the big city, keeping her lunar activities secret. In Feet of Clay, Angua’s paired up in the Watch with a new recruit, Cheery Littlebottom, a dwarf with definite opinions about werewolves–based on their general nastiness and vicious treatment of everyone in Überwald (everyone except vampires). Angua ends up saving Cheery’s life, revealing her wolfish identity at the same time. Even so, the two become close friends. In later books we see that Angua’s shrewdness, strength, and self-reliance has earned her a few promotions, and she becomes one of Vimes’ most effective and dependable sergeants.
Sergeant Detritus of the Ankh Morpork City Watch. Another one of my favorite Terry Pratchett characters. Detritus is a troll who’s pretty green as we follow him through the book Men at Arms, but he’s already a sergeant in Feet of Clay. One of the weapons he favors is a repurposed siege crossbow named the “Piecemaker” that he’s modified to shoot multiple bolts at once.
We first meet Sam Vimes as a miserable Night Watch captain in Guards! Guards!, when he’s scrambling to keep his sanity as a lowly copper, when all he has are the scraps that remain after the guilds and nobles have divided up the wealth and decided what law and order will look like. As you’d expect, it’s been beaten into a shape that best suits them. He’s often drunk, unable to do his job, haunted by the deeds of his ancestors, but if you stick with Vimes, you see that he knows the streets of his city like few others, he understands the workings and motives of the Ankh-Morpork guilds and aristocracy like an insider, although he will never be one. Above all, he’s just a good guy who has never had it easy, but who has taken the opportunity to learn something at every turn, from his humble beginnings to his marriage to the most powerful woman in the city. We can always rely on old Vimes. We can rely on his solid moral core, and even the need to “go spare” when it’s necessary. That’s Sir Samuel Vimes, Commander of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, Duke of Ankh–also known by the lofty title, Blackboard Monitor. He’s another one of my favorite Terry Pratchett characters–he may be my favorite, although I’m very fond of Granny Weatherwax. This time I’ve painted the mountain pass scene in The Fifth Elephant, when Sam, Sybil, and party are waylaid by bandits. Vimes has other plans, and he has three tools he can use: the one-shot assassin’s weapon he confiscated from Inigo Skimmer, a cigar, and a match to light it.
Corporal Cheery Littlebottom is a disgraced Alchemist who quickly becomes the forensics expert in the City Watch, and goes on to spark a gender revolution. We first meet Lance Constable Littlebottom in the book Feet of Clay. She’s a new recruit in the Watch. She’s originally from Überwald, and was in the Ankh-morpork Alchemist’s Guild for a while, but was a bit careless with the volatile compounds and kicked out. She’s like a one-woman CSI department, so their loss is Ankh-morpork’s gain. Even though she’s not a main character in any of the books, Cheery is definitely one of my favorites. I’m going to sum up with a passage from Feet of Clay between Captain Carrot (he starts off on the conservative side) and Sergeant Angua:
“Do you think there’s something a bit…odd about Littlebottom?”
“Seems like a perfectly ordinary female to me,” said Angua.
“Female? He told you he was female?”
“She,” Angua corrected. “This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We’ve got extra pronouns here.”
More on gender and equality in Pratchett: “Creating a Space of One’s Own: Dialogues of Gender in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld” by Züleyha Çetiner-Öktem (https://goo.gl/uuEFzS)
Carrot Ironfoundersson, also known as Kzad-bhat, which roughly translated, means “Head Banger”, is a human adopted by dwarves. He was raised in a mine near Copperhead, probably banging his head a lot, but ends up making the journey to the great city Ankh Morpork in order to join the Watch. Even though Commander Vimes and a few others in the Watch possess a pretty strict and streetwise morality, Carrot enters the city fully prepared, with a completely memorized ancient edition of The Laws and Ordinances of the Cities Ankh and Morpork. And he’s ready to use it to ensure the safety of his fellow citizens. What makes Carrot unique–and so different from anyone else wielding a book of laws–is his ability to interpret a law and balance that against an examination of his own perspective and the motives of others to resolve the problems they face. It’s this simple wisdom that usually carries him through the fray–that, and his joyful spirit. Carrot approaches his position in the Watch with such cheer, generosity, and honesty that everyone around him has no choice but to get swept up in the sheer force of his upbeat will. His genuineness and optimism–some might say _extreme_ optimism–balances out and sometimes runs roughshod over the cynicism and distrust that’s the baseline sentiment of the Ankh Morpoork City Watch. His fellow watchmen often stand back and just stare in awe as Carrot singlehandedly diffuses the tension between armed angry mobs of trolls and dwarves, as he cheerfully explains the criminal code–or the tax code–to hardened thieves, murderers, and tax-evaders. He’s not flawless and carries some of the prejudices of his upbringing with him, but he’s honest enough to see what’s right, and what he must change in himself in order to make his adopted city a better place for everyone. We first meet Carrot in the book Guards! Guards!, where his idealism and hard work make such an impression on the Watch that he’s promoted quickly. In one of Terry Pratchett’s later books, Snuff, Carrot becomes Acting Commander of the Watch, while Vimes is forced to take a vacation.
Havelock Vetinari, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork. Lord Vetinari is the definitive benevolent dictator. He’s an honored graduate of the Guild of Assassins, rebel fighter against Homicidal Lord Winder, killer of tyrants, and friend (possibly more) of the vampire Lady Margolotta of Überwald. Pratchett kept his cards close with Vetinari, and all of us–readers and Ankh-Morpork citizens alike–remain in the dark about most of the details of Vetinari’s life, habits, vulnerabilities. This may be one of the reasons Night Watch is one of my favorite Pratchett books–because we get to see Havelock when he’s a young man, at school, learning the guild craft of assassination and camouflage. We get to see a side of the future patrician that we’ll never see again, but after one read of Night Watch the character hints and pieces of his nature you pick up will follow you and fill in the shadows of every scene with Vetinari in every other book. He’s one my favorite characters, not just from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, but from _any_ book.
Granny Weatherwax: My favorite witch, and quite possibly my all-time favorite Terry Pratchett character, Esmerelda Weatherwax, “Esme” as Nanny Ogg calls her, and “Mistress Weatherwax” or “Granny Weatherwax” to those living around Ramtops. She is said to embody all three roles in a coven (maiden, mother, and crone), and although she’s always pictured as the last, in the book Lords and Ladies, we get a glimpse of just how badass she was when she was younger. So for this study I wanted to paint her as she was in her mid-fifties, out for a stroll through a mountain meadow with her favorite swarm, at a time when she earned the name “Aaoograha hoa” from the trolls (She Who Must Be Avoided).
