Oromë (I may convert)

Here's a bit you probably didn't know about me as an artist: I don't see faces when I read. I have some form of prosopagnosia (the inability to recognise - and imagine - faces), and when I read, I think of characters very much in body form, movement, colours, dressing style. The same goes for real people, by the way. I can recognise a student of mine from behind and from a hundred yards away by his style of dress, shape and the way he walks, but it takes me two months to tell him apart from the other blond kid in class when they're just sitting there. 

When I draw a character for the first time, it's a matter of very consciously asking myself: What sort of movement, body type, style and colours do I associate with them? I do see long, round, soft or angled faces and hair silhouettes, and I have sort of mental face assembly kit with different shapes of noses, eyes, mouths and hairstyles, which I can then use to assemble a character on paper. It's a bit like active and passive vocabulary. I have all that stuff filed away, and recognise them when I look at faces, but it takes a conscious effort to actually use them in visual arts. In drawing, it's always a matter of inching towards them. Most often, it takes me a few attempts until they feel aligned with the fuzzy vision I have in my head. If I have drawn them often enough, my drawing version supercedes the fuzzy one when I read. Sometimes it slips and I have to consciously bring it back. 

I think I have only drawn  Oromë one single time, in "The Noontide of Valinor", very small in the margin. I was pretty sure then he wasn't my  Oromë. But then, I didn't really have one.

My vision of Oromë suffered from a tragic case of having leafed through some David Day book my mother had at home, with a few absolutely weird illustrations. A lot of them were very abstract, and I have a vague memory of the article for "Oromë" under an image of a fuzzy, stiff, fat man on a horse. That was before I'd read the Silmarillion, but unfortunately, first impressions tend to stick, and when I read the Sil, Oromë was this fat man on a horse. 

When I sat down to draw him, he was really hard to grasp. He needed to have a warrior's face, but also a kind one. He needed to be round. (A character with two O's in their name has to be.) In face, if not in body. 

I was totally undecided on a beard. I sketched him without, then tried to give him a full beard, and I think that this is what he has. He still looks too young, but hey, I think I can live with that.