The Tragedy of Faust 8

"Come they as dreams, or memories to me?"

50 x 35 cm. Rapidograph inks on Schoelleshammer G4 illustration paper.


Faust awakens and Mephistopheles explains to him where they are and that as a Christian entity, he essentially is powerless in this pagan reality. Faust then goes his own way in a daze and comes to a lake where in he spies female forms swimming in the depths. He speaks with the nymphs who try to entice him into the water but he resists their charms and explains he seeks Helen. The nymphs take pity on Faust and point him towards the distant palace of Menalaus.

After this I intended to draw another image which showed Faust in Arkadia, with Helen. In the story they are eventually married in a pagan ceremony where after Faust leaves her. He climbs a mountain and finds a way back to the mortal world, but is followed by Mephistopheles... I never drew this picture because I ran out of time.

Faust returns to a battlefield and shortly afterwards Mephistopheles turns up with four warriors in antique armour. The four riders devastate the enemy. This was another possible illustration which was sacrificed due to the dead line If I'd had the time I would have drawn a large and complex battle scene but I felt it was just to ambitious with the time constraints I had. As it turned out, I later attempted such an illustration in my 'Hobbit' project, but again, failed due to the sheer size and complexity of the image.

Nymphs sketch

The idea with this picture was to create the illusion of depth to indicate the remove between Faust and the nymphs. To some degree I think this worked, but I made a serious mistake when I inked up the two foremost nymphs in that I broke the rule of the style which is to let all the lines follow the sime direction. I had the idea that using horizontal lines would create a sense of movement, but what actually happened was the two foremost nymphs appear to be seperated from the back ground and floating in space, where as the third, distant nymph appears to be in the element and thus far more ephemeral.