While Amazon’s big Lord of the Rings show probably wasn’t the success anyone involved in bankrolling or promoting it might have been hoping for, there was still some good stuff there, and one of the big things that I wanted to focus on for this post was the work that went into designing its world.
While we’ve seen Middle Earth a bunch of times on the screen, from 70s cartoons to Peter Jackson’s six films, there were a bunch of places in this prequel series that we’d only ever heard of. From the island kingdom of Numenor to the Southlands to the Harfoot’s travelling village, the team of artists—headed by Rick Heinrichs and Ramsey Avery—working on Rings of Power were tasked with taking a world we thought we knew and showing us, well, you haven’t seen all of it, or at least not when it was this old.
In this slideshow you’ll find a selection of works from some of the artists responsible for this, primarily the ones working in 2D on stuff like concepts and environment design. There are links to each artist’s portfolios in their names, displayed at the top of each slide.
