A New Endeavour

I made my mother a saint portrait for her birthday – but it’s obviously very different from the devotional work I have done previously. I’m kind of excited about it but I’m also not sure where it falls in relation to copyright restrictions, so I am only posting it here for now rather than on my social media accounts. Several of the previous saint portraits I made have been in the style of stained glass windows, but also more or less photorealistic (because that felt natural and fitting), and they have all been as cards for people to whom the point is providing an image of a particular saint. The parameters of this one were wholly different.

I began with the idea of making a colorful digital drawing for my mother that I could send her as a file on her birthday and then print out later to brighten up her gray apartment. I toyed around with a few different ideas – largely featuring dinosaurs – but then I was inspired to do an image of Saints Monica and Augustine in the style of characters by Fabio Napoleoni (one of her favorite artists) in front of a stained glass window with the flaming heart that is the hallmark of depictions of St. Augustine. I have been wanting to make my mom an image of St. Monica for a while – she has been on a unique journey with her faith recently and the devotion of St. Monica to her son while he had wandered from the Church has been a comfort to me – but I haven’t gotten around to it and was not sure a traditional depiction would have been particularly meaningful to her. This image was the perfect way to make something that was significant to me while also making it something she would hopefully enjoy. To be honest, the figures are barely recognizable as their namesakes (most of what identifies them in art is their clothing – and I thought that dressing the ragdolls up in the habits of a nun and bishop might be a bit literalistic and defeat the approachability of the depiction) – but hopefully the intentionality is enough (I did remember to give them halos – albeit subtle ones).

The poses and colors are completely from my head (though I was a touch disappointed at the restrictions of CYMK options, especially for blues), and the stained glass background is very much my style, but many of features and elements of the form of the figures are directly inspired by Napoleoni’s work – which is why I am unsure how publicly I can share this. The characters are obviously not his, but equally obviously based on one of his characters.

This project involved other firsts for me as well. I have recently begun experimenting with utilizing both Photoshop and Illustrator for a single project to capitalize on features unique to each – and I tried to do a time lapse, but I think my computer was a little over-taxed with the level of detail in the stained glass and the screen-capture program I was trying to use kept crashing (and not saving). I am quite happy with how the stained glass turned out – and the process I was able to hone as I went along. I’ve done this style with pencil and marker on paper and with cut black paper framing tissue paper, but this was my first attempt at doing it digitally – and I’m quite pleased with how it turned out – (barring an initial hiccup when I wasn’t keeping track of my magnification and ended up zooming in and out far too much – resulting in wildly uneven patterns and much more drawing, and therefore time, than I needed to sink into this project).