Happy Birthday to me! In the fine Hobbity tradition, I drew a gift for someone else on my birthday! This is dedicated to my dear friend, @forestofstarlight, who got me into The Hobbit! I’ve been wanting to draw Thranduil draped in jewels and furs for her for ages! 

In my mind, this is 100% Thorinduil.

I wanted to show a blending of elf and dwarf aesthetics. Thorin and Thranduil may be antagonistic grumpy assholes but I am in lurve with the idea that, despite all of that, they not only find each other aesthetically pleasing but that there is a deeper connection that no amount of screaming matches, stomping off in a huff, and prolonged sulks can erode. 

I love the idea of Thranduil being Thorin’s muse; he goes back to jewellry making because he’s a perfectionist and he wants Thranduil to wear HIS designs. Thranduil would try to refine Thorin’s style. Thorin cares about how he looks but he’d pretend he didn’t just to annoy Thranduil and get him to sigh and roll his eyes. He’d insist on dwarven-made everything until the first time Thranduil wrassles him into some fine, Mirkwood silk… then, slowly but surely (THRANDUIL CAN WAIT! A HUNDRED YEARS IS A BLINK TO AN ELF!) more and more elf-influenced pieces would make their way into Thorin’s wardrobe. Give it a couple of decades and you’ll find Thorin and Thranduil looking regal and unique in a blend of dwarf and elf aesthetics.

Some of this piece is still doodley but that’s because this is still a sketch! I’m also not terribly sure I like Thranduil looking so… doe-eyed? Maybe he’s trying to be seductive? XD I usually see him as more masculine than he appears here.

Soooo, this one is much closer to my original illustration style but it is hella time-consuming! I used both a regular HB pencil and a 0.3mm Pentel mechanical pencil. (Which I recently purchased to replace my ancient 0.3mm Staedtler pencil. It died. It died sooo hard.) I usually enjoy drawing curls but those braids were so much fun to figure out and draw I cannot lament the lack of curls in this pic. There’s a whole bunch of tweaking that needs to happen before I can ink this but I’m happy where it is for a sketch!