The Metal Art of Alan Lee
While his color palette doesn’t lean into the black, it doesn’t have to. Alan Lee is one of the great metal visual artists of our time. Like Frank Frazetta of Conan fame, he knows how to amp up the feeling of danger, but he also brings out plenty of awe. You can almost hear the whispering of an ancient curse on the wind as you look through his staggering library of works.
If we’re going to understand why his work really is so metal, we need to get to know a bit more about him.
Who Is Alan Lee?
Alan Lee (born in 1947) is a British illustrator and designer living in England. He is most famous for his work illustrating fantasy novels, especially those by J.R.R. Tolkein — Most notably, Lord of the Rings. Looking at some of these images, you might feel a sense of familiarity. This is because you’ve probably seen them, you just can’t remember when. They all have that decidedly cryptic, spooky, and heavy feeling that lingers with you well after you’ve turned away.
He’s also illustrated many other fantasy books like The Lord of the Rings. These include Lavondyss by Robert Holdstock, Merlin Dreams by Peter Dickinson, among others.
One of his breakout projects was the surprisingly metal Faeries (1978), which he co-wrote and illustrated with Brian Froud. The book is like a handguide to the folklore surrounding mysterious magical creatures, like goblins, ogres, mermaids, selkies, dwarves, and more. The illustrations are deeply disturbing in their own fantastic sort of way.
Beyond the world of illustration, Lee has also worked as a conceptual designer for the film industry. As you might expect, that includes Peter Jackson’s series The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. He also worked for the 80’s sword-and-sandal comedy Erik the Viking as well as the criminally underrated 1998 TV mini series Merlin.
How Does Alan Lee Paint?
The secret behind Lee’s genius is his ability to render something grotesque without reaching for tropes or outright clichés. He doesn’t need a bunch of skulls and cobwebs to show you there is something dark about a place. Hell, he doesn’t even need black half the time.
He is a master at capturing atmosphere, making places feel epic, lost in a misty past of legend. In other words, he ups the scale to a point that his scenes are both familiar and exaggerated beyond realism. That’s not to mention that his designs are unbelievably brutal when he wants them to be. For instance, remember Sauron’s tower from The Lord of the Rings movies (Barad-dûr, as fellow Tolkien-heads well know)? The one with the fiery eye on top? He designed that.
The reason Lee is a perfect fit for Tolkien and books like The Lord of the Rings is that he knows how to balance fantasy with a creeping feeling of mystery and uncertainty. It’s dark, the way old myths are. Looking at Lee’s paintings of elves and hobbits is like hearing the original version of fairy tales for the first time. You realize that, oh yeah, this is heavier than you remember. There’s demons and spells and warriors and people being eaten alive. And that’s all really, really metal.
And if you’d like to read something as epic as these images, check out our books, including The Elder Wyrm, a retro fantasy novel inspired by the art and music of the 70s and 80s,