Gandalf the Grey

 

Dulce Domum

I had seen a painting of huddled buildings caught in a time of wintery wonder. The vividness of which I could imagine Mole and Rat walking down the street that winded between them was so inspiring that I decided I had to put it in my own sketchbook.

 

    In particular, it reminded me of Chapter 5, in which Mole and Rat go on a long stroll out on the countryside and come across a small village just as it begins to get dark. "The rapid nightfall of mid-December had quite beset the little village as they approached it on soft feet over a first thin fall of powdery snow. Little was visible but squares of a dusky orange-red on either side of the street, where firelight or lamplight of each cottage overflowed through casements into the dark world without" (The Wind in the Willows, Chapter 5: Dulce Domum, pg.81.).

 It remained unfinished in my sketchbook for some days, during which Christmas and New Years passed me by.

  

 I kept painting on it, though, and slowly it took the form I had first imagined.

 

Night and snow slowly cover the little village. The two friends walk along between the buildings, watching as the light from the windows grows brighter as everything else grows darker around them.

 

 When I first read Wind in the Willows, I found flipping between pages created a feeling I cannot quite explain in words. The sentences wrapped around the artwork was like a window on it's own, letting us, the readers, look into their world much like they look through the glowing windows of every house. Every page feels full and complete. It is a feeling I hope to one day create in readers as they flip through the pages of my own stories.

There is Still Much to Read

 

 “I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”  

               ~ C.S. Lewis