I love the description of how he first manifests himself to our heroin Tiffany Aching seemingly from nowhere on a fine sunny day as she makes her way to the city of Ankh Morpork. There's a real presence of malevolent evil about the character.
The picture above is my attempt to depict the character at the point he makes his first appearance in the book.
Like a lot of my digital paintings I have created it using ArtRage 2.6 together with a Wacom tablet. This is still a work in progress, for example I have expanded the picture to show a little more of the foreground (you can see his feet) & I have made other alterations here & there. There is a possibility that the version shown above may appear on the Discworld Wiki site as an illustration, which I have to say I'm quite proud about!
If you wish to know more about The Cunning Man I heartily recommend ` I Shall Wear Midnight '.
I hope you enjoy viewing this painting.
Bye for now.
David
I had all but forgotten about this!
ReplyDeleteAnyway, to cut the story short I recently went to check the Wiki page out to see if my image is still there: it isn’t.
Out of curiosity I checked the page ‘history’ to see why! There is some discussion amongst the site’s contributors about the painting not being good enough for their Wiki page and how it fails to meet (in their minds) the correct description of the character. Fair enough, each to their own. I can’t argue the artistic merits (or lack of), of my attempt, however I would say that there are reasonably accurate visual references to what might have been a ‘Witch Finder’ in the English Civil War period! In Terry Pratchett’s novel ‘I Shall Wear Midnight’ there is only minimal reference given to the character’s appearance, one notable characteristic however is that he has no eyes, just holes where they should have been! I accept that there are differing interpretations of how a witchfinder might appear; perhaps the Wiki page people might refer to something along the lines of a Spanish Inquisition type of character?
I didn’t request that my little interpretation be placed on their site, somebody there chose it.
But anyway, the site’s editors refer to one of the contributors there who is sighted as an example of a good illustrator, the writer makes special reference to this artist’s interpretation of Angua as a depiction that ‘can’t be beaten’! Based on that particular critique, I just had to go and check the picture out! What I found was a (well drawn, well executed) image of a fairly generic semi-clad young woman. The trouble is it could be of ANY semi-clad young woman, (a 1980s ‘Page 3’ model perhaps?). How on Earth this was in any way an example of an accurate depiction of the particular character (Angua), and my little digital sketch, in the eyes of the editors was not, beggars belief!