A year ago, I found a big artbook in my local library--"Edward Lear's Tennyson." (Yes, the Edward Lear who wrote nonsense verse like "The Owl and the Pussycat". He was a talented artist too.) The book was a sort of a mockup of a project that died centuries ago--a book deal that never was. Lear had some 200 watercolor sketches (unfortunately most of the reproductions don't show his superb colors) that he hoped to use to illustrate Tennyson's poems, though they're weren't inspired by them--they're sketches done on Lear's real travels in Europe, the Mediterranean, North Africa and India. He even mapped out which real place might pass for each of Tennyson's imaginary settings. Lear was confident, I guess, that almost no one would recognize them as travel sketches. Travel wasn't easy then, and travel photography was still in its infancy.

Lear contacted Tennyson and proposed the book, but the poet dragged his feet. Understandable--it was an ambitious idea, and at this point both men were old and ill. The project died along with them.

They were lovely compositions. An amazing talent, really. Yet he couldn't get much money or respect, even for work this good. Taste of the time. Only oil paintings were considered real art... It's curiously like the ukiyo-e artists in Japan. To a large extent, custom, medium and subject matter define what's art; certainly not beauty!

So I decided to use the compositions of Lear's sketches as bases for illustration--landscapes for my alien world Pegasia. With its detailed tours, the place needed dozens of landscapes, and Lear's compositions were much better than my own.

I scanned about 120 of them and ended up using about 100. Felt like a thief, even though wedding them to texts they weren't meant to illustrate is exactly what Lear himself hoped to do with them. And they were too good to leave languishing in obscurity--many are privately owned and few now seem to remember this side of Lear.

So all through 2009, I slowly tweaked these grainy little grayscale scans--flipping, coloring, shading, altering, changing human figures into... others. I doubt any of them will be immediately recognizable as Earth scenes; Lear's travels were centuries ago after all, and the Old World has changed a wee bit. And once I got through with them, so had these hybrid pictures.

Oh, well. It's a mutant age.

--Chris Wayan

Here are the Pegasia landscapes I based on Lear's watercolors--90 so far. Your turn now: draw me the natives!

Click the thumbnail image to see just the picture; click a picture's label for the tour describing that landscape.

Continent 1: NW seacliffs	Continent 1: hexatemple?	Continent 1: hexakeep?	Continent 1: NW woods	Continent 1: western lake	Continent 1: central mts
Continent 1: northern gulf	Continent 1: northern mts	Continent 1: steppe	Continent 1: southeast	Mwelari Is. off Cont. 1	Continent 1: "Dover"
Continent 1: "India"	Continent 1: SW canyon	E. Continent 2: volcano	Continent 2: Yezfez	Continent 2: pass	Continent 2: temple
Continent 2: Badwater Shore	Continent 2: central mts	Continent 2: western seacliffs	north Continent 2: "Morocco"	north Continent 2: promontory	north Continent 2: veldt
N. Continent 2: C. Fippit	Continent 3: Shkoom Wood	Continent 3: Mt Lookcha	Continent 3: Onjelli Veldt	Continent 3: Oomla Desert	Continent 3: Tira Gulf
Continent 3: central mts	Continent 3: Chukalapp	Continent 3: Dukduk Forest	Continent 3: Churnip Gulf	Continent 3: Torlei Peninsula	western Continent 3: Port Fizrat
Continent 3: Lempop Lakes	Continent 3: Thookwap	Continent 4: tropics	Continent 4: desert falls	Continent 4: desert village	Continent 4: Pseudo-California
Continent 4: Westport	Continent 5: NE coast	Continent 5: waterfall	Continent 5: walled town	Continent 5: "W. Nile" ruins	Continent 5: "W. Nile" ruins
Continent 5: "East Nile" ruins	Continent 5 southeast	Continent 5: sunset, boats	Continent 6: rainforest	Continent 6: crag-city	Continent 6: central hills
Continent 6: southeast	Continent 6: Lake Swirltoe	Continent 7: southeast port	Continent 7: south coast	SW Continent 7: chateau?	Continent 7: western mts.
Continent 7: northern prairie	Continent 7: far north	Continent 7: eastern mts	Continent 7: "Samarkand"	SE Continent 7: Cape Nwok	Ebchok-t-chak
NW coast, Continent 8	NW mts, Continent 8	Continent 8: northern prairie	NE Continent 8: mountains	NE Continent 8: lake	Continent 8: western gulf
south Continent 8: gorge	south Continent 8: rainforest	south Continent 8: coastal range	Continent 8: Cape Jumpoff	Curl 9 Islands: harbor	east Continent 9: rain
Continent 9: eastern sounds	Continent 9, antarctic	Continent 9: northeast	Continent 9: central prairie	Continent 9, north coast	north Continent 9: tyger hamlet
Continent 9: tufa tower	west Continent 9: oasis	Continent 9 near Lake One	Continent 9: tipis	Continent 9: west coast	Continent 9: sunset

The gazetteer: will have a full index of native placenames, with descriptions--once the contests's over and we have natives to name them.

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