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TurnerMohan β Orc Faces
#orcs #ugluk #lordoftherings #tolkien #urukhai
Published: 2015-01-28 10:01:13 +0000 UTC; Views: 15811; Favourites: 225; Downloads: 108
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A couple orc faces in gouache with photoshop touch-ups; this was my first time experimenting with gouache (one of my first experiments with photoshop as well) and I find a lot of the time it helps, when trying out a new medium, to fall back on a familiar subject matter. These came from my recent (and umpteenth) re-reading of the "Uruk-Hai" chapter in the two towers, in which Tolkien, for the first time, gives us a look at the orcs from a little closer than the point of a sword, and orcs are pretty fucking scary up close and personal, especially when you're in their power as Merry and Pippin find themselves; their lives dependent upon some tenuous orders of Ugluk's that seemingly half of the company are just chomping at the bit to worm their way around, leering at the hobbits with their horrible faces and prodding at their soft flesh with harsh, clawed hands. The whole chapter has the feel of a prison rape in the making.In many ways Tolkien's orcs seem to represent this all-purpose parody of society's "lower elements" especially as reckoned in Tolkien's time; like the weasels in "the Wind and the Willows" they speak in cockney accents and generally come off like grotesque exaggerations of crude working-class ruffians, best dealt with with a stern hand (usually one wielding a sword in Tolkien's world). Especially in the figure on the left, I'd hoped to somehow convey a distinct englishness to his face and expression, similar to how I might depict Mr. Hyde or some of the really bad pirates from "Treasure Island", while drawing out his features to horrible, inhuman dimensions; his face and head jutting from his shoulders like a living gargoyle, culminating in that leering (and dangerous looking) set of choppers. I imagine this is perhaps the yellow-fanged guard poor Pippin wakes up to. The way I see them, the orcs should be sort of like those post-Darwin political cartoons or phrenologist theories come to life; the ones in which just about any type of perceived social undesirable (the poor, the "criminal element," the chinese, blacks, the irish, ect) were painted as depraved ape-monsters.
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Comments: 34
Tolkien's viewpoint was a little more complex than that - as he put it, "We were all orcs during the Great War", and left the impression that orcs represented the worst of our natures.
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I remember you saying among the inspirations for orcs were Industrial Slummers, and Military Bullies. Have you also considered orcs as being capitalists to?
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Not really no, they seem about as feudal, economically, as anyone else in middle-earth
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Ah, ok. Alhough it would be funny if the orcs were capitalists. XD
(I asked cause I watched an old episode on the History Channel talking about Tolkien's mythology.)
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one could also see the orcs as a sort of mirror to humans least admirible qualities. The otcs are inteligent and ingenious but they can not make annything good, just instruments and machinery to kill and destroye and despoil lives and nature. Tolkien was against the unchecked advance of industry that ravaged the english countryside he loved so much, thats why there are ents. One could see Mordor as a warning as to what happens whean industry goes to far.
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i also feel a pressence of fran frazetta ape-men. Β like those sub humans from fire and ice and neanderthals, something that looks like they are somwhere between modern humans and Β our most distant ancestor
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Kind'a reminds me of the orcs from the movies. The one in the middle in particular reminds me of the snaga orc from The Two Towers, makes me think that he was based on the yellow fanged guard.
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Oh look ! An Orc helmet (I don't know if it really is an historical thing or not but I like it). That'll do for these heads.
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I've actually been working on facials for female orcs myself. Wanna see?
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Β Goodness me but THESE are Orcs; wasted, pitiful, tough and NASTY with it - one can imagine this lot in prison, on the gallows or in the ranks of some conscript horde but it is difficult to imagine them getting up to anything good!
Β It is interesting to note that at the top and the bottom of this image there are two reasonably sympathetic individuals (old Topper looks like he's terrified but trying not to show it, Bottom looks like he'd rather be anyone anywhere else but is too D--- unlucky to find his way anywhere Good in life) but then there's Old Shank in-between who looks as if he makes a wicked way through the World and thoroughly enjoys himself in the process.
Β Quite frankly he's Chaucer's 'Smiler with the Knife' incarnate and that's an enormously fitting look for an Orc, if only to counterbalance the fairly-common perception of Orcs, grounded in WARCRAFT, which would be that they're huge hulking and shamanistic fellows - which is one way to depict this particular species, but utterly at odds with the pseudo-Industrial Slumdog Villains whom Professor Tolkien wrote into Middle Earth.
Β In conclusions, Well Done once again Master Mohan!Β
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Hey man, this stuff is amazing! A bit of photoshopping surely heps giving us a better perspective of what your artworks look like in reality.
The yellow-fanged guard looks exactly as i always imagined him (or her? hard to say when speaking of Orcs 
P.S. Oh, we really need a private chat to keep talking about that Durin's Folk thingie, don't forget that
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oh, and btw, if you want to see an almost perfect portrayal of "orcs" i strongly recommend Alien 3 if you havent seen it. Ripley crash lands on a tiny prison planet in deep space, the inmates of which cover almost the whole range of orcish personality types; the big scary social-orgnizer-by-force, the weasely types, the hard-nosed british authoritarian, the untrustworthy scum, and the go-along-to-get-along guys (it's pretty much the only reason i would recommend that movie
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yeah well photoshop helps reverse the effect of a mediocre scan (which is usually all i can afford for a larger piece like this) you get back some of the color and the contrast that you loose in the scanning process.
yeah the sideburns i think give him a real nice ugly 19th century feel, like some back alley thug in victorian london. I remember regretting that i hadn't given Azog sideburns when i drew him a long while back. also i liked the idea that orcs, despite being overall more hairy and beastial than men, are kind of sparsely bearded, kind of like apes i figure, with most of their facial hair concentrated on their sideburns and necks, you'd never see a mustached orc (except maybe a few thin strands at the corners of the mouth) the jutting muzzle, inhumanly wide mouth and those really nasty looking fangs were all largely inspired by chimps, who can pull their faces back into these really disconcerting grins (which are actually a sign of aggression, i think) that really helps sell the orcs as a different creature from men; though shorter and smaller than men alot of their body parts (hands, feet, musculature, jaws) and their facial features are really, cartoonishly large and roughly put together, like they could practically bite your whole face off in one go. men and elves (as we humans are next to apes) are much more gracile and finely put together, with better motor control and such, so it doesnt take much training for a man to be a more competent sword fighter than an orc, but i wouldn't think you'd want to pit-fight a big one (the physicality (and all too often sexuality) of the "lower elements" seems to be a usually unstated but recurring source of unease for the armchair class in western society, whether you're looking at the "black brute" stereotypes of the old south or the apprehension among the european gentry about working class "scum" who are not to be trusted around either your money or your women, but kept in line with a stern hand, the air seems to be one of a fear (often veiled with contempt) for people, races, and social classes who have lived physically and personally rougher and more trying lives, and tolkien's world, though a world of fictional creatures, seems to come at it from this same vantage point; most of his (most relateable) protagonsits are somewhat soft-bellied gentlemen of leisure)
I don't know if the red paint on that middle one is blood or just meant to evoke it, but yeah that's what i was going for. originally i'd intended to have the "rays" in his hair emenating from a crude painting of the lidless eye on his forehead - he started in the drawing phase as an orc of mordor, but as soon as i drew that evil fucker above him this one just struck me as more of a free range "goblin," a little shaggier and more tribal than one of sauron's troops. He looks like he's had a hard life and been exposed to the elements for much of it. I was going for that skin quality you see elderly tribal people in central asia and siberia get (of the three f them, he's definitely the closed to the exggerated mongol type tolkien describes)
the one up top is a real barker, pretty close to how i see ugluk, and the uruk hai in general. younger, stronger and a little dumber than the other two, that one looks like he'd probably be the best at following orders and keeping the orcs i his charge in line (i'd imagine orcish discipline has often been a point of some frustration for various dark lords, most of their species have all the organizational capacity of convicts, even with grishnakh, a high ranking leiutenant, it's hard to say when he's cozying up to the hobbits if he wants the ring for sauron, or himself, or is just being a weird predator)
I'll send you a scan of the orc debate scene in progress, i think you'll be pleased
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Awesome!! I don't know if you understand this as a compliment (I hope that you do) but you and some other artists here have really helped me to get rid of the imagery of the movies when I read the books.
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well, though I love the movies and have drawn plenty of artistic inspiration from them, drawing my own versions of tolkien's characters has helped me to reclaim and fine tune my own mental image of the world of middle-earth, so yeah if you feel that my work helps do the same for you I'll definitely take that as a great compliment, thank you
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Wow. These are awesome! Do you mind if I use this picture in a D&D campaign I'm currently running? This is exactly what I was picturing.
I especially like the lower one for it's calmer, almost thoughtful expression. That and the greener color contrasted with the dark dreadlocks somehow makes it seem more alive and realistic. I have always been interested in Tolkien's orcs and it makes me sad he never properly expanded on their culture and general way of life. Like you said above, most of the time we only see them from the wrong side of a sword, but that's not their whole life. They do exist outside of battle, and they to perform tasks and chores other than murder, but we're just kind of left to guess at what those might be.
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hey, sorry i didnt get back to you earlier. I don't know what a dungeons and dragons campaign is since i don't know much about D&D, but you can use them as long as you're not making any money off them 
I hear you about orcs and wanting to know more about their lives. as i mention in regards to this piece , I expect the actual majority of their time is spent just going through the motions of life; eating, sleeping, shitting, having sex where they can get it, sitting still, ambling around, daydreaming. that one down below looks to me like he's had a long, hard life, and not all of it really evil.
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Oh, no problem. I've been pretty scarce on this site lately anyways.
The worst part is, Tolkien set the standard for one dimensional villains and it's almost never broken anymore. Most movies and games sport liegions of bad guys who have little to no motive. Even worse, they are often mindlessly slaughtered with no chance for repentance.
It drives me crazy! Conflict is depicted as one sided and cliche all the time, when in reality there is no winner in war.
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An excellent character study; I suppose you made all 3 faces separately and then used Photoshop to combine them as one stacked image? Gouache isn't a technique that shows up a lot in fan art, it's nice to see it here as it gives a lot of detail without many sharp lines.
In Chapter 3 of TTT Tolkien let us see and hear (and smell, ugh) the Orcs up close for the first time since Goblin-Town, and without the fairy tale atmosphere of Bilbo's story it is an unpleasant sight. The Orcs become distinct beings of many places: Grishnakh's company of the Lidless Eye, Ugluk's company of the White Hand, and the "hired scimitars" from the Misty Mountains of varying sizes and abilities. The initial conference where Pippin is a silent witness to the combat for alpha status which will decide the fate of Merry and himself is taut and fierce with tension and sudden violence. Indeed the threat of harm or its infliction on a chosen target is never absent for the entire time the two young Hobbits are with the raiders, although one can make the case that Ugluk and Grishnakh were both under the goad of duty to powerful superiors, which would have caused conflict even if they felt inclined to cross strongly delineated lines to cooperate in the face of the threat of the "horse-boys".
Your series of faces shows the effect of the practiced brutality of the Orcish lifestyle, with long years of deprivation and pain inflicted and given out in return etched into every feature. The trio of images seems to work that progression out from top to bottom in some fashion. Savagery is present, but not the savage nature of humans who live by Nature's rules with little room for carelessness or impractical kindness. Rather, it is the savagery of a system which has long since decided to manufacture Morlocks over Eloi, and is presiding over their creation in a most determined manner! I very much doubt Tolkien was influenced by phrenology or other such racial science, since he had a great deal of contempt for such things. Most likely the Orcs like Grendel were depicted in pre-modern fashion as ugly beings because their exterior was the mirror of their interior, with the added irony of their interior being no small part a result of the exterior forces that brought them into being. 
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no they were all drawn and painted together just as you see them, but i used photoshop to remove a wodden cigar store indian i had painted first in the bottom left corner (he felt a little out of place in such company) and just to make the lights and darks "pop" a little more for the computer screen; photographing and even scanning images tend to flatten and dull them significantly, and though I've always presented my images un-touched up (mostly for lack of knowing how to do so) I've learned that alot of the artists whose work I admire will do touch ups in the computer, mostly just to get their scanned work to look more like how it does in real life.
My idea here (which became more clear to me as i worked my way up the page) was to present what you might, very vaguely, call the 'three types' of orcs. you've got one of the company from moria at the bottom; these wooly, savage creatures like the goblins in the hobbit who, in the long millenea without any dark lord to take orders from have pretty much gone tribal, their societies revolving around charismatic alpha males - like azog, bolg or the great goblin - and basically functioning like wolf packs, hunting and scavenging by night and then retreating to their holes in daylight. as you say they live hard lives (all orcs do) and are ferocious enough as predators but they don't get alot of military training or discipline like those living under some lord like sauron or saruman. the one in the middle is more or less what i consider a middle-of-the-road orc, like grishnakh and his band; it's a face you could see cropping up in pretty much any orc army at any time in middle-earth's history, he's probably pretty old and kind of savvy, like the boys at kirith ungol, and with the one up top i was going for the "black uruks" sauron (and later saruman) have been experimenting with for a few hundred years; bigger, stronger, and more disciplined in battle than the other two, it's easy for me to picture ugluk as this great, barking Harry Andrews type, like he walks around straight-backed at all times even thought it's a physiological strain on him to do so (i kind of like the idea also, of shaving their heads and bodies as a sanitary measure being a big thing among many militarized orcs for a long time, hirsutism seems to be a running characteristic of goblins and other such monsters throughout history, and it's not hard to imagine the orc populations as plagued by lice-type parasites)
as I mention below, I don't think tolkien was big into the scientific racism which permeated the culture and even academic circles of his day (he doesnt seem to have really been a very scientifically minded person at all, coming at his fictional subcreation from a more romantic and religious angle, probably because that was more the lense for seeing the world to which he was personally inclined) but for concept art purposes, it definitely helps me to draw, as I've done in all my earlier orc studies, from the consistent portrait of brutish "subhumanity" established by the thinkers and cartoonists of that time. Tolkien once referred to the orcs (I'm sure you're familiar with the quote) as "degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types" and they are painted by tolkien as physically very ape-like; long, hairy, powerful arms and hands, short crooked legs, grishnakh at one point calls ugluk an "ape," and ofcourse the uruks at helms deep are said to climb the ladders up the wall "like the apes of the southern jungles." for my purposes as an ilustrator (though this may not have been tolkien's intent in any stated, conscious way) I don't see the dual references to apes and to the "least lovely mongol-tyes" (or to some among them such as the uruks, as being black-skinned) as mutually exclusive; europeans had considered other races; black people, asian/mongoloids, australoids, and even the irish (see this old "scientific" illustration comparing the features of the "celtic type" to the "negroid type"upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia... ) as being ugly and inferior compared to themselves, pretty much since the first time they encountered them, but it wasn't until the 19th century and the influence of darwinism - when we started to understand evolution and understand apes as being not just animals that happen to look like us but actual distant cousins - that western racist thinkers began to entertain ideas of the other races as being (from an actual, biological point of view) less advanced, less human even, than themselves (pretty much all the above-mentioned peoples have been compared to monkeys or apes by white racists, the political cartoonery of the 19th and early 20th century is rife with depictions of irish immigrants, blacks, and chinese rail workers as ape-like creatures) It was (and is) of course completely ungrounded scientifically, and merely promulgated on contempt, but in the fictional world of middle-earth it finds fairly suitable (and safely inhuman) representation in the form of the orcs, creatures who kind of bleed the line between ancient racism - against, say, traditional enemies of the west like the mongols or wholly imagined fairy tale creatures like goblins and ogres - and scientific racism. they are like the huns, as described by the writers of antiquity, who were almost always described as practically inhuman monsters, but with the orcs they actually are literally "inhuman monsters" (you see a lot of very orc-like subhuman figures depicted in Frank Frazetta's artwork, usually fulfilling racist "black brute" stereotypes like carrying off screaming naked white women frankfrazetta.org/viewimage.ph...
I don't see orcs as a direct reference to either (tolkien often made a big deal about how much he disliked allegory) but rather a perfect blending, they are both (mongolids and apes) and they are neither; a more serious, consolidated presentation of the popular fairy tale "goblins," one that works from many perspectives; historical, mythical, evolutionarily, and ofcourse as i refference above, class-based aswell; tolkien's orcs, whatever they're physically described as looking like, talk like the "lower class" of british society. they're a pretty tall order as a design challenge goes, a good depiction of them, for my taste, successfully evoking 19th century fairy tale goblins, barking 20th century british army bully boys, dikensian slum dwellers, subjugated medieval peasants, apelike subhumans, the dehumanizing characterizations given to "wogs" and enemies of all breeds from the south and east of europe, starting with roman writers like tacitus and going all the way up to that wwi "stop the hun" propaganda, the roughly 19th/early 20th century eugenic concept of the genetic inferiority of people of other races, catholic conceptions of "fallen humanity" at it's worst, and prison gang culture, while being kind of funny throughout.
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A cigar store Indian as a model for a M-E character is pretty unique in my experience.
I like your physiological studies a lot because it makes the Orcs distinct enough, not just athletic actors with Halloween mask and makeup, or drainspout gargoyles devoid of soul, or absurdly Muppet-like "goblins" from children's tales. The distinctness of the physiological builds brings the somewhat human characteristics into focus, which is of course where the magic happens.
Tolkien gives the Orcs the same ability to show up whenever and wherever they feel some adjacent people have it better than themselves. This of course inevitably gives them the same bad press that the civilized lands have always given to the invaders from beyond the edge of the map who arrive to slay and plunder. This is not unique to Orcs in Middle-Earth of course, but they are the one people who don't have an out to withdraw beyond the boundaries again, but stay around to cause trouble for their own sake or that of an overlord. Bearing this in mind while reviewing your reply and seeing the pictures reminded me of a couple of Renaissance-era woodcut portraits of Attila. The artists apparently took the contemporary chroniclers at their word, and so to the modern Tolkien fan these pictures of the Scourge of Christianity comes across as an Orc or Half-Orc with a goatee! 
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yeah i think some diversity of orcish moods and character successfully come through in these; the loud, bellowing big dog up top, the vicious, weasely-looking one in the middle, and the worn and even a bit reflective one down below. it was something i really enjoyed about doing them at a larger scale than i normally get to do heads (a few inches across a piece) and it took a surprising amount of building up to, for me, to feel i'd had a clear enough picture of what orcs were built like in my mind before i could start depicting their expressions (i'm not a big fan of muppet goblins or big muscular kiwi stuntmen in scare masks, and less so of the more recent seven-foot digital behemoths, all seem to miss what orcs are supposed to be) the earlier color study that i did of the male and female over that campfire helped me to establish to my own satisfaction the physiology of the orcs, which should look powerful and brutal, but also kind of wretched (alot of animals have this look, even among creatures famous for their stateliness like lions, the majestic, full bodied mufasa types are a rare sight in prides of mostly bony-assed, weather-beaten, hungry looking creatures) and actually this study grew out of another piece i'm currently working on (which when finished will be one of my "historic costume plates" in that same light watercolor wash over pen lines as the two by the fire) of the debate you mention between ugluk, grishnakh and the moria captain, in which i'd hoped to get to showcase, both in their physiology and their gear, the diversity between the three "orcish types." when i decided to do some practice work in gouache the idea came to me to do some closeups on the three types featured in that piece, which is how this piece came about. I hope to have that costume plate up in a few days but pen work tends to be a slow and cautious medium so we'll see
the orcs are indeed ugly on the outside as part and parcel to their ugliness on the inside. i forget which of my eloquent commentors said it (and well done if it was you) but they're like humanity seen through a dark mirror; they're like us at our worst (i love tolkien's allusions in the hobbit, so childishly stated but unmistakeable, about how "goblins" have since created all sorts of horrible contraptions and means to kill people, it's impossible to think he is not talking about things like mortars and mustard gas and machine guns, the line is the fairy tale companion to his later assesment that "we we're all orcs" in WWI) and humanity at our worst are basically orcs, whereas at our best we come to be more like the elves who seem to represent this never-totally-fulfillable picture of what we could be; all our good potential realized, they're what we, at our best, aspire to be like (it should be noted that, though i agree that eugenics were probably never at the front of tolkien's reasoning on the matter, both elves and, far more commonly, orcs, have had a genetic influence on humanity in ME, the one almost entirely good and the other almost entirely evil, and he even said at one point that any true human claim to kingship can only come through shared blood with the elves, which is pretty damn eugenic thinking, albeit concerning fictional creatures). It's largely for this reason - the taking of two classic fairy tale staples, elves and goblins, and placing them in this dichotomy of morally and personally "superhuman" elves on the one hand and "subhuman" goblins on the other, with humanity in the middle like the great wild card - that i like and tend to stick with the most commonly accepted origin of orcs (though tolkien himself might have changed his mind on this) as tortured, ruined elves. It just works so damn well.
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Surprisingly I was not yelled at by fans of Brian Froud for "muppet goblins", which shows what nice people they are...or how few of them look at your work.
I am certain that WW I marked a sensitive man like Tolkien for life, as it seemed to have done so with similar men all across Europe who served in arms. Like all the young men of the gentry and middle class who joined "Kitchener's army" he had no real exposure to military life or any real comprehension of the abrupt advance military technology had made over its application. He didn't have even Churchill's limited experience in the colonial fighting and the Boer War as preparation, and Churchill (no sensitive artist-type) would later observe that "War, which in the past was cruel and glorious, has now become cruel and squalid." It still couldn't repress his beautiful fantasy world, but he now had a grim understanding of warfare, its cost in all the missing young men, and the senseless destruction which had perhaps fatally undermined Western Civilization in what was supposed to be the new century of unlimited possibilities. The "Lay of Leithan" was still a grown-up fairy tale, but Tuor's prophetic journey to Gondolin was unsuccessful, and a beautiful city was swallowed up in fire and the cloud of smoke & dust of collapsing masonry. Turin's struggle against Doom gained a real bite, and the opus on the Rings of Power now featured as the titular character a Dark Lord who would unleash the mayhem of a world war on the Free Peoples of the West, and call it good. Indeed, he would not stop at military victory but insist on a very subjugation of mind and soul as well. And what would the foot soldiers, the shock troops of such a Dark Lord be like? In the Orcs we have his answer.
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Great work!
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i don't know if it was at the front of his mind per se, tolkien doesnt seem like he was particularly big into the scientific racism of his day (definitely not as much so as Lovecraft) but the theory-of-evolution-inspired notion (an incredibly self serving notion at that) that some people may actually be, on a genetic level, less "human" than others definitely provides, aesthetically, this new dimension to all our recieved cultural myths about human-like but subhuman hordes of goblins and such which are meant to represent us at our worst (providing the other end of this spectrum we have the "super-human" elves, like a race of living classical statues, a representation of what humanity, on it's best days, can aspire to be like)
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I agree on that. His own description of orcs as over-the-top mongolians would suggest that even though he did not intend to misrepresent a particular group, he was on some level inspired by the idea. It has always been easy to sum up all bad character traits within humanity and apply them to a certain group (even though I personally do not believe Tolkien was a fan of that tradition) - the orcs are the perfect example of that. Your mentioning of working class ruffians is also interesting. "The other" can be socially based as well as culturally or racially.
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I like the bottom two the most, especially the one with the grin! Sort of looks like he's poking with that dagger and very creepy says "Give us a kiss" or "i'll gut ya, head to toe"Β haha
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that one's based on an actual character among merry and pippin's captors, who threatens them in a pretty similar manner.
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For the sake of Merry and Pippin i hope it was the gutting thing he threatened with
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No need to thank!
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