The Wounding of Glaurung

Turin Turanbar delivers the mortal stroke to Glaurung. There’s a bunch of images that changed along the way here. I really worried this image to death, and went back and forth from extensive paint overs then flipping back to those early sketches (its almost impossible sometimes to capture the movement and immediacy of those initial sketches, which is a real pain).
Anyway, you can see a lot of the changes are focused on the shape of the head, that right front limb and paw, and the length of the tail.
Oh and for the Lore fans amongst you, you can see in the detail showing Turin, that just behind him you can see Hunthor, falling into the river Taeglin, struck in the head with a rock loosened by Glaurung’s passing over the chasm of Cabed-en-Aras.
There’s also a close up of one of the earlier head of Glaurung version’s that shows Niënor swooning on the grass in the foreground, I think I’d just thrown that in there as a medieval painter might, trying to show two scenes in time in the same image, but after all the pearl clutching a show like RoP has received over the smallest perceived deviations, I thought why bother trying, so I removed her, maybe I can paint that scene later sometime.