I’ve not done much with Steve the orc for a while. I think the Dolly Zoom was the last thing I blogged about. I’ve also done a version of Banksy’s Flower Thrower, but haven’t blogged about it.
He still needs a proper full-time job. His stint as a stand-up didn’t go well, he made the papers after his misplaced dwarf joke caused mayhem at the Mordor Improv.
So now he’s got a job as a model to drum up tourism business by Mordor’s Sea of Núrnen.
Mordor is so bracing!
There are a number of inspirations for this picture. The obvious one is John Hassal’s 1908 poster for Skegness. Second, the painting Coalbrookdale by Night (1801) by Philip James de Loutherberg. And, of course, the image of Sauron’s tower Barad dur is inspired by the design used in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.
A skipping orc
The main image is Steve mimicking the jolly fisherman. The process is easier than it might have been, since I spent quite a lot of time building Steve last year and setting up rigging so that I can pose and animate the figure.
It took a while to get the pose right; the floppy hands and tilted-backwards-in-mid-air pose needed to capture the gay abandon of the original.
There were a couple of ways I could have done the beach and sea. The easiest would have been to make a copy of the original as a flat plane, maybe make it in Canva and use this image as the background. However, I wanted to get a reflection of Steve’s boot in one of the puddles like in the original. Reflections are simple enough, a smooth metallic surface will do that.
The beach and sea are one flat plane which I used Texture Paint to colour yellow for the beach and blue for the sea. Putting my artistic hat on, I added some white foam and random deeper blue in the sea. The beach itself includes puddles and footprints. The footprints are a darker shade of the yellow for the sand. The puddles took a bit more thinking.
What I ended up doing was colouring in the puddle areas black and then using that as a mask to make the beach transparent in those areas. Then I added another plane under the beach and coloured that silver. The end result is that the silver shows through with a bit of shadow, looking like a puddle.
Barad dûr
The Lord of the Rings films present Sauron’s great tower as an impossibly tall stone tower, topped with an all-seeing eye. The One Ring’s magic strengthens the foundations; when Frodo / Gollum destroys the Ring, the tower collapses.
To model this, I started with a cylinder. As I extended it I altered the width to make it a bit more interesting. At the top I added a cradle for the Eye of Sauron and the Eye itself.
The eye is a sphere, flattened and pulled around (that’s a technical term). Selecting certain parts of the solid mesh allows you to colour in some of the eye as bright orange, the rest is black for the pupil.
To strengthened the illusion that the tower is very tall and far away I added some clouds. I made these using the rock generator add-on in Blender to make semi-random shapes. Then I shaded these to an off-white and stretched to make clouds.
Final scene
The final scene has some added starfish and lettering. I added the letters in Blender, though I could also have used Canva for this. The initials ‘GMR’ stand for ‘Great Mordor Railways’. This is in contrast to the original ‘GNR’, or Great Northern Railways.I have assumed Steve and his family have taken the train to the coast; roads in Mordor can be murder in the holiday season.
The final picture makes a cameo in one of my ‘wall smash’ videos (see below). It probably works best as a poster, but it’s available as a t-shirt and on other goodies.
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