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Blood Meridian - Landscapes #1

Cormac McCarthy's literary masterpiece 'Blood Meridian' (rightfully described as 'the ultimate Western') had a profound impact upon me. The intensity of his prose and descriptive passages border on an almost biblical, hallucinatory form of poetry.
Alongside recent character designs, I decided to try and depict some of the landscapes he describes in the American Southwest of 1849.
If you haven't read the book, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

'Ice had frozen on the rock and the myriad of icicles among the conifers glistened blood red in the reflected light of the sunset. He watched it pool and flare and drain away dragging with it all that pink and rose and crimson sky'

'Ice had frozen on the rock and the myriad of icicles among the conifers glistened blood red in the reflected light of the sunset. He watched it pool and flare and drain away dragging with it all that pink and rose and crimson sky'

'They moved on and the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack mountains. Tethered to the polestar they rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite.'

'They moved on and the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack mountains. Tethered to the polestar they rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite.'

'They rode up through a lonely aspen wood where the fallen leaves lay like golden disclets in the damp black trail. The leaves shifted in a million spangles down the pale corridors and Glanton took one and turned it like a tiny fan by its stem'.

'They rode up through a lonely aspen wood where the fallen leaves lay like golden disclets in the damp black trail. The leaves shifted in a million spangles down the pale corridors and Glanton took one and turned it like a tiny fan by its stem'.

'All to the north rain had dragged black tendrils down from the thunderclouds like tracings of lampblack fallen in a beaker. They ascended through a rocky pass and lightning shaped out the distant shivering mountains and lightning ran the stones about...'

'All to the north rain had dragged black tendrils down from the thunderclouds like tracings of lampblack fallen in a beaker. They ascended through a rocky pass and lightning shaped out the distant shivering mountains and lightning ran the stones about...'

"The old church was a ruin now, a wreck of what it had once been. The stone walls had fallen in on themselves and the roof was gone. The timbers of the bell tower had rotted and fallen. There was no sound save the faint wind in the skeletons of the trees'

"The old church was a ruin now, a wreck of what it had once been. The stone walls had fallen in on themselves and the roof was gone. The timbers of the bell tower had rotted and fallen. There was no sound save the faint wind in the skeletons of the trees'

'They rode through a highland meadow carpeted with wildflowers, a vast plain of varied small blooms reaching onward to the farthest rimlands blue with haze and the adamantine ranges rising out of nothing like the backs of seabeasts in a devonian dawn'.

'They rode through a highland meadow carpeted with wildflowers, a vast plain of varied small blooms reaching onward to the farthest rimlands blue with haze and the adamantine ranges rising out of nothing like the backs of seabeasts in a devonian dawn'.

'They climbed up through rolling grasslands where a buzzard labored up from among bones with wings that went whoop like a child’s toy on a string and in the long red sunset the sheets of water on the plain below them lay like tidepools of primal blood'.

'They climbed up through rolling grasslands where a buzzard labored up from among bones with wings that went whoop like a child’s toy on a string and in the long red sunset the sheets of water on the plain below them lay like tidepools of primal blood'.

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