The Severed Child

"He had no daemon at all, the Gobblers had cut it away, that was intercision and this was a severed child..."

Iorek Byrnisen, Lyra Belaqua, Pantalaimon and Tony Macarios.

Digital painting in Photoshop under scanned pen drawing.

I've wanted to do a piece of His Dark Materials fan art for ages...obviously the most attractive character in those fabulous books is Iorek the armoured bear...awesome. The biggest challenge for this picture was designing the bear armour. In the text the description is suitably vague, possibly because he didn't have an idea of what it should look like. I figured it had to be practical, upright and on all fours, took ages to come up with something I was happy with and I'm still not sure I've nailed it. I've heard they're making a movie and I'm hopeful it'll do the books justice...more LOTR than Narnia...and I'm very excited to see what the conceptual artists come up with for the Panzerbjorn.

This is a scene from book one, Northern Lights. Where Iorek and Lyra, under orders from the alethiometer break from their party and go off in search of one of the missing children. When they encounter him they're in a shed, so I've taken a bit of license.

The bear looks a bit bottom heavy cos I intended to take a much lower camera angle but in the end it didn't work with the composition and I'd already inked the foreground...

But yeah go read the books if you haven't, on one level a brillant fantasy romp, on another a cutting commentary on the place of organised religion in our world. Beautifully written Pullman shows up J.K.Rowling for the hack she is...Not that I don't like the Potter books...but next to HDM they seem, well...childish.

Flame on!

added 16/7/06 - realised also that during this scene in the book Iorek has earlier decided that he won't be needing his armour as there is little danger of attack, this also allows Lyra to ride on his back...so...heh...its a cool pic but I kind of buggered it up