#hope he's diva enough - you've asked for the most potato and least qualified person to have good judgement on what is elegance lmao

[navyinks]

Performance in Tirion. This is a commission for @samarqqand​​, who wanted to see a “younger pre-Darkening Valinor Maglor when he's a diva looking concert-ready and pretty.”

Closeup & inspiration commentary below cut

Key visual inspiration for this piece comes from two sources: Godecharle’s Apollo sculpture (yeah I specifically looked to Apollo for inspiration because of course I did), and Galadriel’s intro scene in An Unexpected Journey. I was looking for an air of elegance that Cate Blanchett portrays perfectly when she turns to Gandalf and Elrond - LOVE watching the way those robes spiral into itself.

The column design behind Maglor is a blown-up & modified version of the cap on the monument to Lysicrates, who was apparently a patron of musical performances and whose choragic monument is the only surviving today... I actually have no idea what I’m talking about here, so take that information as symbolism with two grains of salt.

The pendant Maglor wears is inspired out of a plate from the Kircherian Museum.

For lighting & colour this time, I wanted to really push a nuanced colour palette that I hoped could bring about the high-class atmosphere the prompt calls for. I also imagine the light from the trees being softer and less contrasted than pure sunlight. The tricky part was figuring out how to incorporate the traditional reds of Feanor’s House, which can create a really jarring effect in the soft tones. In the end I tried to use its saturation as a proxy to pull the focus into Maglor’s face.

Did it work? I’ll be able to answer that in a few more months from now 😬 (it was a fun experiment though lol)

Songbird because it’s CLASSY (but also because composition lmao)

I played with the idea of getting one of the younger Feanorians to stand there holding his hair but scrapped the idea. One day I’ll make it work but today is not that day x’D

thanks for reading! This was a fun one to work on, and surprisingly stress-free past the initial sketching phase, I think I definitely want to do more of these desaturated pieces in the future.