Henderson, faunified at last

Oh dear. Well, there are a lot of problems with this picture, but i guess it fulfills the conditions of the commission, so i'll let it go for now. Still trying the wrestle with the problems of fantasy art in general and faun anatomy in particular. Not sure that i've got the proportions spot on here, but Henderson always did strike me as rather short-legged. The tentacle/horns annoy me the most, although i did experiment with several differet horn styles and this seemed the best. I do need to find more source material for spiral and curving horns! The hands suck, but hey, so what else is new. Actually, the whole groin area is fairly crudely done, pardon the pun! :P

Oh well. I hope it suffices for now. Larger size is on flickr, if anyone is interested.

Thinking whilst drawing last night, it came to me why Gandalf couldn't have used Gwaihir to airlift the ring to Mt. Doom in the first place... it has to do with the tactics of war. If, at the time of the council of Elrond, Sauron was still gathering his strength, Mordor would have been in a defensive formation, with a strong watch on all routes, including the air. We know that Mordor did have aerial capability, through the mounted Nazgul, as well as smaller birds that were used as spies. A large eagle would have been quite conspicuous. The only reason why Frodo and Sam were able to get to Mt Doom at all was because Mordor shifted to an offensive formation and they were able to sneak behind the lines, as it were. Although, i guess that still doesn't explain why they didn't fly them down to somewhere close to Mordor and then continue on foot, or paratroop them in once the battle on the Pellennor fields was joined. Hmm.