Friday Art Attack

Well... it hasn't been the most productive of weeks when it comes to posting.  Next week will be guaranteed just as bad, because unlike this week that's just ending, I won't even have access to online most of the week.  But, well... here's your regularly scheduled Friday Art Attack anyway.

When you're in a graveyard and you see a tomb like this, you can be sure that's the one you want to loot.  Pro tip for D&D players, I suppose.

Speaking of D&D, here's another interpretation of Vecna, with a ghostly hand and eye replacing the missing ones.

Venus cat.  This reminds me of Carson of Venus and the Frazetta cover for it.

Yeenoghu, the demon-prince of gnolls.  Another D&D meta-character.

If the Empire ever wiped out the Gungans, the galaxy wouldn't mourn that much.

The Ken Kelly cover to Swords of the Horseclans, a popular series when I was a kid (or, at least, there was a very long shelf of them at the bookstores and libraries when I was a kid.)

One of my favorite Warhammer undead, which no longer exist, I guess, since the Tomb Kings are gone.  I'm pretty sure the models for these are out of print now.  Sad-face.  They were awesome.

A fantasy wizards from a setting like DH5.  They'er not kindly Gandalfy or even Merlin types.  They're weird, scary, probably fanatic and anti-social psychopaths who's exposure to energies that Man Was Not Meant to Wield have caused them to look sickly, deformed or both.

Thuvia and the banths, by the master himself.  Great image.

A Wayne Reynolds werewolf from some card art, I believe.

Deneghra the War Witch done in a pin-up style.  Heh.  Kinda funny stuff.

I'm not quite sure wha this is, but maybe giving him a few coins is a good idea...

A werew-hyena done in a fairly realistic style.  I've got some others that are more stylized or superhero styled as well. 

A wight according to 5e.  Keep in mind that barrow-wight is a word Tolkien used to refer to the draugr or the haugbui, and William Morris had already established that precedent before Tolkien.

Given my focus on the Old West and fantasy, it's inevitable that I'd try to find every image of this type that I could, right?  You'd actually think that there'd be more than there are.

As an side, although that steam engine isn't completely relatable to a real steam engine, it's clearly of the sort that belongs more to the 1940s and 1950s than the 1880s.

A nice ink of the wolfman.

Friday Art Attack

I've missed a few weeks of Friday Art Attack, so I probably absolutely and definitely owe it to myself to fix that by making sure I do it today, and making sure today's is a little bigger than normal.

My namesake.  I mean, how cool would it have been if my parents had actually named me Ivanhoe?  Probably not very, but at this point in my life I'd appreciate it at least.

An interesting and vaguely Lovecraftian take on the Jabberwocky.  On the other hand, just giving a dragon a bunch of eyes maybe isn't sufficient to make it Lovecraftian...

I've always loved this kind of art.

The Pleistocene in Japan.  Although Hokaido and the southern isles would still have been separated by a strait during the low point of Ice Age sea levels, both were connected to the mainland; Hokaido through Sakhalin to Siberia and the southern islands to Manchuria.

I might actually have posted this before, but it's still in my folder, so I'll do it again and then move it.  A montage of Barsoomy stuff.

Cool Imperial Jedi hunter fan art.

The so-called Jeep Nacho.  I really like it.  I want one.

The Jersey Devil, one of the weirdest of cryptid/supernatural ghost stories.

A scene from The Gods of Mars.

Fingolfin goes to fight Morgoth in The Silmarillion.

John Colter, among the manliest Americans who ever lived.  Love his knife too.

A Ken Kelly piece that served as the cover art for the last of Lin Carter's Callisto series.

More cool Star Wars fan art.  With a kind of sci-fi High Noon vibe, as it should have.

I'm also always a sucker for 80s nostalgia type stuff.

According to the fiction, Juiblex and Zuggtmoy are locked in low grade Cold War conflict for control of the Abyssal Layer that both occupy.  Juiblex is, of course, nothing but a named D&D shoggoth, and Zuggtmoy, the Mushroom Queen is either kinda creepy or extremely silly, depending on how they manage to present her.

I've always loved Destiny concept art.  Too bad the game(s) were kind of flat.

Salvage operation near Jupiter.  Again; I love this kind of stuff.

Some Jurassic World art.  Too bad the second movie in that reboot was kinda flat too, for that matter.

Beren and Luthien confronting the King of all Werewolves, Carcharoth.

Aboriginal North American Horse

I found the paper I was referring to; THE ABORIGINAL NORTH AMERICAN HORSE, which posits that the North American horse did not go regionally extinct to only reappear when it was reintroduced to the Americas by the Spaniards.  There are various reasons that I find this actually considerably more likely than the default status quo !SCIENCE! position on the question, but the reality is that without doing genetic testing of the remains of the slaughtered aboriginal horses, we'll never be able to tell for sure.

However, given the massive "oh, heck, we actually had it all wrong about horse domestication!" in Eurasia moments that we've recently had dropped in our laps, we shouldn't be surprised to find this myth, of the missing native horses, is vulnerable too.

Anyway, check out the paper.  I think it's both interesting and convincing.

A "final" post on model railroading

I found a copy at a decent price of Malcolm Furlow's book on a narrow gauge HO railroad.  I always kinda wanted to buy this book back in the 80s when I was buying these books, but I hadn't done so.  I clicked on "order" from an independent Amazon retailer earlier today, so I'll have a copy.

Malcolm Furlow seems like my kind of guy, honestly.  I prefer his approach to that of the Tony Koester types.  Here's some quotes from this thread that apply:

If you try to approach Malcolm Furlow through the operations/prototype/serious paperwork /serious history/serious track planning lens, you will never understand him nor the work that he did - nor why that work gets so much recognition. 

You have to start with the understanding that Malcolm is first and foremost an artist who chose model railroading as his medium of expression, and he did a phenomenal job doing it.   In a lot of ways he was a bit of the Bob Ross of model railroading, he made it look easy, and produced scenes that are the entire back story to the railroad without any exposition whatsoever.  No histories, no operating schemas, no grand stories written in the text; just track, buildings, and a collection of scenes that together and alone tell the story, no further explanations necessary.  For those who cannot figure things out without the full dissertation behind the railroad ["I'm modeling the New York Central between Albany South and Albany North on December 2nd, 1934 from 12:08 to 15:62 but NOT 15:63"] his approach is very frustrating indeed - what do you mean, you can have a layout without all those other parts??? 

Malcolm left the spotlight after he became frustrated with the Koester crowd - that's the easiest way I can put it, from what I can collect reading what Sam Posey wrote in "Playing with Trains."  And by frustrated, I mean, tired of having people show up on his lawn in the dead of night to argue with him about how his way was wrong and detrimental to the hobby.  Now you have Reverse Runnings like the one Joe wrote last month about the Era Police, repeating the common [almost rhetorical, at this point] question "has it all become Too Serious?"...   [...] 

Now about the San Juan Central, I've read in places that Malcolm didn't necessarily use any of the track planning guides most people use; he started with a sketch of an idea that looked good in his head, ignoring things like even curve radius, and built it.  The result is the San Juan Central and the railroads that appeared after it.  They're the sort of work that frustrates the logical sequential mind where everything has to be connected to a sublying plot, but if you are willing to unhinge yourself from that anchor, you may find his work to be a real joy, intellectually.   

Now there may be many who gripe about his lack of adherence to "reality," the lack of "proper railroading background" to his premise, but consider this: In a span of about 3 years, or perhaps even only 6 months, from when he started the San Juan to when he sent in his first submissions, he went from a virtual nobody with seemingly little experience at all with the hobby to John Allen's successor/protege. He published articles month after month on end in the most serious of model railroading publications, he gave clinics, he produced a whole line of publications to support others in their pursuit of the hobby, he became as well known around our kitchen tables as any of the well established Old Guard.  And he made it look easy, by and large due to his background - the same background John Allen claims.  Engineering and fine drafting may make perfect structures and perfectly sound designs, but it is art that makes perfectly weathered images of what may very well appear to be a real scene - even if only on a planet imagined by Dr. Seuss or Lewis Carroll - that all together conveys a complete experience.  You've just found that steamer trunk full of old photographs, and alas, there's no text on a single one about where they came form or what is in the pictures, they're just pictures with no "historical" analysis... 

He left the spotlight because quite frankly, he get[s] a lot more appreciation from the art community than he ever did from the model railroading community, and they pay him Very Well for his efforts.  They don't line up to tell him how he's doing it wrong and how to do it right; they line up and hand him money for what he puts on canvas, be it 2D or 3D or whatever medium he decides to work in. 

Some more quotes:

Oh, I'm just the messenger this time... 

Sam Posey, Playing with Trains, pg 150-151 

"Scenes like this, and the creative impulses that went with them, had put Malcolm in direct conflict with Tony Koester in the struggle for what model railroading should be all about.  Bob Hayden had remarked, sensibly, that there was more than one hobby here and one approach was just as legitimate as another, but as I listened to Malcolm, I wondered if I would take the chance of putting him in a room alone with Tony.  Tony's total commitment to realism was equaled only by Malcolm's utter disdain for it.  "Accuracy is a crutch," he said to me and went on to describe a modeler who told him his embankments were too steep to be prototypically correct.  "Can you imagine that?"  he asked me, getting angry once again over an incident that had happened more than ten years ago.  

Malcolm's extreme modeling was a lightning rod for people who thought the hobby should be about trains, not personal expression.  He has had people call him crazy to his face.  He has received hate mail.  When he was living in Texas, people would come to his house and wait outside his door for a chance to argue with him.  He said, "It's as if I was violating the Holy Grail of model railroading."  

When he had turned to painting, it had been a relief to leave all that animosity behind, but now that he was attempting a comeback in model railroad, he worried that the opposition had become stronger.  He told me darkly that Tony and his legions of operators had gained the upper hand.  "The operators will wreck it," he said, "because they don't offer people anything to look at.  Scenery—that's what attracts people, gets them excited.  The operators want to allude to model railroading as an art form, but when the art part actually comes up they practically run for the door." 

I'm not really saying anything new when I say "The Koester crowd." 

Such a railroad [the SJC] would have never existed.  The reason the San Juan Central is what it is, is because Malcolm designed it that way.  Malcolm had no more or less access to prototype information and the design tomes in the 80's as we do now; he simply chose not to use that information, and I suspect he never would - and in the face of the original, I dare say Malcolm proved such information is quite simply unnecessary.  Those sharp curves and steep grades is just what makes the pictures as dramatic as they appear - it's not an optical illusion! 

There was a layout tour in one of these magazine [It might have indeed been MRH!] a little ways back about a railroad that is in essence a replication of the original San Juan, but the builder went ahead and applied these construction philosophies to the original -better curves, better grades - and the end railroad is indeed gorgeous to look at too. The track plan is a fun arrangement, but if you were to embark on the project, I wouldn't be so bold as to dismiss the original in the manner that you have.  It all goes back to understanding the artist...

Now, to be fair, I have no interest in a model railroad that doesn't really run.  But Furlow's approach is more my approach.  Painstakingly reproducing realistic operation based on "the prototype" (i.e., real life) is much less interesting to me than any other aspect of the hobby.  I'm actually not super interested in trains, railroads or operations—although I would want a layout that actually worked, and I would want to come up with some operation cards to give me something fun to do with it after it's built.  But whether or not it's "realistic" or whimsical fantasy doesn't bother me in the least; in fact, the latter appeals to me a great deal more.

Here's some pics, magazine scans from the 70s and 80s, of Furlow's Denver & Rio Chama railroad.  It was obviously modeled to look like the G&D.  But word on the street is that it was a visual layout with poor attention paid to design considerations or craftsmanship of the trackwork, etc. so that it often didn't run very well.  That said... sure is pretty.  I can see why Furlow appeared, and by making everything look easy, turned into the model railroad equivalent of a rock star for a time period.

I've thought the same thing about John Olson, but maybe Olson was more the complete package, maybe.  I've seen scans of an article that highlight his Mescal Lines RR, but it isn't really all that much to go on, but it looks similar.  So does his small project J&SW, frankly.

"I think the primary goal in my photographs is to bring people into a world that doesn't really exist through my eyes; through my experience.  You can walk as a scale dimensional person through this little miniature world.  I'm not so interested in scale model accuracy as in sharing my little visions and fantasies with other people, and by taking them there through my one-eyed camera, I'm therefore much more able to bring them with me.  And I think that's kinda what speaks for my style and my brand."

—John Olson

And as one guy said in the threat linked above: "It's fine if Malcolm Furlow or John Allen style railroads aren't everyone's cup of tea. I get that because the 8 inch wide shelves with a static grass prairie and building flats slapped against the backdrop  aren't mine. But the thing is, I still consider all of them model railroads, they are just different approaches to the hobby. Calling anyones modeling a caricature or especially a "cartoon" is derogatory in my opinion, it irks me every time I hear it or see it written."