A Thing Which Has Not Happened For An Age

" 'I am not going to tell you my name, not yet at any rate.' A queer half-knowing, half-humorous look came with a green flicker into his eyes. 'For one thing it would take a long while: my name is growing all the time, and I've lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time saying anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.' "

"They found that they were looking at a most extraordinary face. [...] But at the moment the hobbits noted little but the eyes. These deep eyes were now surveying them, slow and solemn, but very penetrating. They were brown, shot with a green light. Often afterwards, Pippin tried to describe his first impression of them. 

   'One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface were sparkling with the present; like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake.' "

One of the most wonderful surprises I got for Christmas was an original metal Treebeard. I started work on it almost immediately.

Sticking it together was the usual pain, requiring a lot of pinning and a Heath Robinson construction to prop it up while the glue dried.

Then came the greenstuffing. Oh, so much greenstuffing. Still, at least sculpting the bark is easier than sculpting scales.

Painting was largely drybrushing and washes to build up slightly different wood tones.

The biggest decision I came to was to leave off the sculpted leaves and replace them with model foliage to give a more realistic finish. I think this was definitely the right choice, especially when I added some leaf scatter in some places.