Category: Fantasy

Worldbuilding Wednesday 7/5/23: From the Spellbook of the White Witch (Narnia XLII)

In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the White Witch (Jadis) demonstrates several magical powers that show her might: she can disguise herself and her servants as inanimate objects, can summon evil supernatural creatures and cause them to do her bidding, and control the weather to the point where Winter reigns in Narnia for …

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Fire and Ice

The two villains of Tolkien’s trilogy and Lewis’s Narnia come together for tea. Scones, anyone?  

Narnian Witches: The White Witch

Over the past year I’ve come across many more depictions of my favorite Narnian character, The White Witch, who is open to more interpretations than any of the “good” characters the reader is supposed to align with. The children mostly differ in the color of their hair, while Aslan is nothing other than a golden-maned …

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The Algae Birds of Paradise

Besides algae, birds of paradise are the only other beings whose heads are attached to complex plant like structures. In India, a flower located on the back of their heads was considered to be a personification of the divine. While algae may not seem to be very animalistic, the more birdlike beings that appear throughout …

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Father of the Four Winds

Oh Father of the Four Winds fill my sails… A young Robert Plant blows some gentle breezes in this evocative illustration by Morgan Rogers. Unfortunately her site is retired and not being updated, but the Zep artwork is still there. A scanned page from the artist’s sketchbook. There’s a quality to her work that is …

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AI Art Adventures: Thangka Lions

A thangka is a Tibetan religious panting depicting a Buddhist deity or concept. It’s usually done on fabric in bright pigments. To my surprise, I generated a dozen of these using the following prompt: Lion, human head of Tibetan King Songtsen Gampo, who is credited with bringing Buddhism to Tibet in the late Eighties. The …

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Elric: Acid, Goth, or Heavy Metal?

[Previous posting on Elric art here.]   Another way portraits of Elric can classified is by the musical genre they evoke or were influenced by. Elric was born in 1961 and matured over the decades since, which means his teenage years, the most musically-influenced period of a young person’s life, ran through the 1970s and …

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Wicked Fairy

Art created in AI. Arthur Rackham-like, no?

Elric: Fit, Frail or Fey?

  It is the colour of a bleached skull, his flesh; and the long hair which flows below his shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody, and from the loose sleeves of his yellow gown emerge two slender hands, also the colour of bone, resting on each …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 3/15/23: Cults

Cults can be amusing, or terrifying. The quintet of fellows above date from the early 1970s, members of a West Coast cult called The Source that even had its own rock group, of which they might be the members (or perhaps Doug Henning wannabees?) Note their similarity in costume to pictures of Aleister Crowley done …

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