Meticulously Mindless Art

Bartholomew the Apostle

Slowly dragging myself back into making art by doing this quick, backgroundless glorified anatomy-study. Whilst drawing, I did consider a more realistic depiction of the skinless body, with more differentiation between muscle, sinew etc., but I decided to go with solid red, in part based on Matteo di Giovannis depiction of Bartholomew.

I do think my longer ‘break’ was a bit beneficial, as I am considerably more happy with this piece (especially the texture on the flayed parts of the body) than I was with my previous most recent artworks.

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Close-ups:

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And a process-video/speedpaint because I remembered to record it:

The idea for this painting came about when I was skimming through the Iliad and came across that one passage in book 3 around line 125, where Helen is described as weaving a cloak (?) depicting the struggle of the Trojans and Acheans.

If I’m being fully honest, I dislike this painting a bit. I feel as though I could have executed it better in regard to both clarity and composition, but I am tired of working on and looking at it, so I’m just posting it like this.

Close-ups:

Process video of my last painting

Lately I''ve been trying to experiment a bit with the blur tool to create a smoother, more organic (?) look in my art, and you can see that here.

Wheel of Fortune

Between my university studies starting to pick up now that I’m entering the 4th semester of my bachelors’ and my (soon to be two) student assistant jobs, I don’t have as much time as I’d like to paint, but I still managed to finish this.

The depiction of Fortuna in the red-black dress is based on several Late Medieval and Early Modern illustrations showing her in that manner; similarly the text and pictures on the wheel (regnabo – regno – regnaui – sum sine regno) are taken from manuscript art, especially referencing the 5th page of the 13th century carmina burana codex (which can be viewed through the Munich Digitalization Center).

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close-ups:

I have also tried my hand at (very simplistically) animating this illustration, so here you go:

I am working on a proper painting, but those always take forever to finish, so have another slightly overrendered warm-up doodle in the meantime.

A little anatomy-study, based on that one famous Bull-Leaping Fresco from Knossos.

This one has been sitting in my wips for a while, and I finally had the time to finish it.

I have been somewhat dissatisfied with my art lately, feeling that it has a certain constructed stiffness that I just can’t seem to get rid of. So I tried to challenge myself to paint something more dynamic and also not to use too many references since I noticed I tend to get too hung up on accuracy to consider the picture as a whole. I am still not fully satisfied with the result, but I hope to improve upon this in my future art.

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Thank you for the question!

Hm. Most likely the Orestes-Erinys piece I did a while back. It is, in my opinion, one of my best compositionally and iconographically.

After that it's probably a tie between the St. Michael and the Ides of March ones I did.

I also have some fondness for the Apollo piece I made back when I was 16 or so, as it was the first time I was truly happy with something I painted (even if it is, in retrospect, a bit anatomically wonky haha)

Trick! Skeleton doodle be upon ye!

Another one in the apparently growing series of “warm-up-doodles I got too fixated on”. This time I experimented a bit with using the blur, smudge and airbrush tools to achieve softer and more painterly transition, hence it looks different from my usual paintings. The facial proportions are a little bit misaligned, but not enough that it bothers me.

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Process-Video [For once I remembered to screenrecord (most) of the process, altough, as stated above this is not representative of the usual way I go about painting]

St. Michael and the dragon

While this took me a whole lot of time to finish, I am very pleased with the end result, both compositionally and in regard to the colour scheme.

The idea for the ornate, white armour in particular came from an illustration of St. Michael in the book of hours of Henry IV of France, which looks like this:

Also, fun-fact: my hometown celebrates an annual little festival, which as its centre piece features a moving mechanical figure of St. Michael slaying the devil, the colour-scheme of which I also referenced for this painting.

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Close-ups:

I’m doing quite well, thank you for asking haha

Thetis with the arms of Achilles

I saw several mosaics depicting this motive and decided to try my hand at it as well.

Also, I just find Thetis to be quite interesting as a character. There’s gotta be something fundamentally Tragic about raising a child, knowing that he will most likely die very young.

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