The Weight of Mid-World

Folks who've visited my website in the last week or saw me at IlluxCon last year will recognize this piece. It won't be new to those who saw me at Spectrum Live, either. The rest of you, however, will be seeing this for the first time. While it's intended as a Dark Tower piece, it's not a quick read as one. You know what? It'll be easier if I just walk you through it.

So, the piece was born as a quick sketch I knocked out last October. I wanted to do something that was different from my usual work and I was leaning toward Stephen King's Dark Tower series as inspiration. I kept thinking of the young Roland, burdened with more knowledge about the workings of his world than a boy his age should have to bear. I also thought about what he was doomed to become: a bringer of death. I chose to tie these two ideas together using a halo.  But not the variety of halos that we're used to today — that ring of gold floating atop a person's head like a crown. No, I was thinking more along the lines of how halos were often depicted in medieval altarpieces and paintings — the more graphic, less dimensional circle of gold lief behind a person's head.

But gold lief seemed all wrong to me.  If Roland had such a halo, I think it would certainly be black. And so, with his head tilted back, his preacher's hat became that halo. The sketches of that image looked like this:

The smaller version was the initial one. I saw the composition as I wanted to present it pretty immediately.  The larger version was an attempt to flesh out a few things, but it became pretty clear that the smaller one was really all I needed. Anyway, I projected the smaller sketch onto a stretched canvas that I had laying around, shot my reference, and started to paint.

Just a quick note before moving on. While I did project the sketch, I didn't duplicate it lovingly or accurately. Anytime I transfer a sketch or drawing, I do so primarily for placement only. It's an attempt to keep consistent the composition of the piece from sketch to finish. Details are going to change — they always do — but the placement of the larger shapes is always important to me. Other folks have different feelings on the matter, with some finding the projection or transferring of a sketch to be either extremely necessary or wholly evil. Given that I generally am using paint to rewrite the wrongs of a given sketch to begin with, I tend not to worry about such things.

Anyway, I painted furiously and finished the piece in time to show it at IlluxCon. But, after the show, I saw a photograph of my booth and immediately I began to see a ton of problems. The curious thing about this is that I'd used a lot of tricks when putting the piece together. I did the mirror trick and looked at it backwards. I'd turned it upside-down. I'd even taken photos of it in process (which I can't find now and suspect were erased accidentally). These various things somehow didn't clue me into the issues, which were mostly proportion related. It's possible, however, that I saw them all along, but a portion of my brain kept them compartmentalized in order to get the piece done in time for IlluxCon. I honestly don't know.

Long story short, I didn't ever get a good image of the piece in that state. After IlluxCon, I packed the piece up and we moved. In preparation for Spectrum Live, however, I dragged it back out and made an attempt to knock it back into shape. Last week, I finally got a decent scan, put the piece on my website, and put it up at the show.  And here it is now: