I bought myself a present!

PROMPT: “In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit”

TEN MINUTE ARTIST PROMPT

“In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.”

That’s it, that’s the whole prompt.

I took the money from my last paid subscriber and bought myself a present. Thank You!… this is the present.

I love learning about how the sausage gets made. And this book presents the earliest complete draft version of ‘The Hobbit’, published 17 years before the first Lord of the Rings book, and very different from the version of the Hobbit we see today.

I imagine reading it will be a glimpse behind the curtain of the process while enjoying this early version of a great work.

Just before I got my agent, I was working through a series of Hobbit Illustrations on instagram, it was not a portfolio piece per say, but it was an exercise to get more of my passion and feeling into my illustration work.

I never finished the series, instead I started making more strategic pieces.

There is a word I shared recently, ‘Kairos.’

A Greek word that means right thing at the right time. It was the right time to do the Lord of the Rings series, because that helped me get my agent (long story), but it was also the right moment to stop the series and draw a monkey, because that got me my first 2 Non-Fiction Picturebooks, which lead to many others!

May we all understand the moment we’re in, and do the right thing.

The right thing for me is to make some tea, put my legs up and read this book.

And as Bilbo would say, ‘Good Morning!’