Pope Francis

So this week I started working on a composition piece centred around His Holiness Pope Francis. I believe that this man - regardless of anyone's faith (and I don't believe that it should offend anyone's faith) is a very good man. He speaks and acts with compassion towards the poor, towards the vulnerable, the sick and the disabled. He prioritises the need to lead by example and provide for those in need. He has shunned a great deal of the ceremonial pomp and circumstance around his role. I think the way that he conducts himself, and the advice that he gives is compatible with the best practise spoken of in all world religions and the major cultural movements of compassionate humanism.

For this reason I wanted to do a portrait of him, but I really wanted to capture the kindness, the softness and the love that seems to be projected from him when he appears in public.

I'm going to show you the work, piece by piece, as I constructed it, and hopefully that will also give you something thta explains my technique and how digital art works (as best as I understand it!). This isn't to say that I'm any kind of artistic teacher or role model of course.

I am entirely self taught - both in term of art and in terms of using the computer to illustrate too.

So I began the piece by sketching out a drawing of Pope Francis, but thinking about his religious context I wanted to invoke a little of the traditional spirit of the Italian renaissance, and bring in some cherubin.

To do this I looked towards Michelangelo (of course) and the Sistine chapel. This was my original sketch:

So the sketch above show the Pope with the two cherubin stolen borrowed from the Sistine Chapel. It also left me with a good deal of blank space there at the back and I needed to find a use for that. I decided it would be an idea to add a Virgin Mary and a Christ portrait to the composition. So I sketched them in on a different level of the image:

Above shows the Virgin Mary and below shows my Christ portrait also.

So now I was pretty satisfied with my sketch overall, and I turned my attention to adding the colour. I focused on the face of the Pope to begin with and worked outward from there because I wanted it to be the dominant part of the work. I used an airbrush technique, varying the size of the spray when I need dark defining lines.

Below shows me then moving on to the left Cherub...

And then the right. Feeling reasonably satisfied with the foreground of the image I then muted these layers of the picture, to allow myself to focuse on the sketches in the background.

So below you can see the colour that I've added to the face of the Virgin Mary.

 And likewise to the face of Christ.

You can see when we bring the foreground layers back into the that you don't need the full illustration of either of the figures in the background because of the over lap.

Happy that I've illustrated my characters, and that they've got the colouring that I'm reasonably happy with, I've then gone to the absolute background of the image again. This time to dress it with colour - including halo effects for Jesus and Mary.

The last thing that I do on any image is to sign a layer at the foreground that sits over the top of teh whole piece. This way, in future, if anyone wanted a copy, but didn't like the signature, it would be possible to provide it without.

On and off this is the work of two evenings, but I'm quite happy with the outcome.

I have created this image, drawing and illustrating by hand on an Apple iMac computer, with Autodesk Sketchbook (which I think is very good value as software goes), and a Wacom Intuous Pen Tablet (small) with stylus.

The Wacom can take some getting used to because you have to get used to drawing and looking up at the monitor - not what you're actually drawing on. That can feel odd to begin with. If you've got the cash you can buy a tablet with a digital screen that you draw straight on. They're not cheap though!

I did create a few other things this week, but I thought it would be more interesting to deconstruct this piece rather than just show another gallery of various images!