Bas-Lag and fantasy Wild West sketches

Well it’s been a few months since I posted anything on my website/blog; I’ve loads of mini-projects on the go that become huge undertakings without a deadline! Here are some examples of several of these from a few years back.

On the left are some characters I was having difficulty placing in a world so I was trying them out in a fantasy Wild West setting. On the right hand side is a Cactus Man from China Miéville’s Bas-Lag world. I’m a fan of China Miéville’s novels, (though I haven’t read them all) and I thought it would be fun to try and depict a Cactus Man from Perdido St. Station. I always liked the Symbolist movement and Odilon Redon’s work Cactus Man http://www.wikiart.org/en/odilon-redon/cactus-man-1882 is a classic example of his slightly creepy and surreal drawings so I tried to incorporate a sense of that into my sketch.

The next pages follow on, more experiments with a fantasy Wild West theme, a Wyrman. See here for a list of China Miéville’s Bas-Lag creations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bas-Lag and some high-fantasy characters I was working on.

I returned to the ideas again in my next sketchbook, I might have been reading The Scar at the time – this time I was considering a New Crobuzon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Crobuzon scene with various lowlifes (a fat criminal boss, his bouncer and hired thaumaturge, that sort of thing). On the opposite page are more doodles of Vodyanoi (frog-men from Russian folklore) who are another race in Bas-Lag. There’s also an idea for a Gundam/Starcraft type exo-suit in the middle.

China Miéville’s ideas are all copyright him, this is just fan art and in no way intended to breach copyright.

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