Like this:

Very often when I sit down to my computer/sketchpad I have more or less nothing in mind to draw, I just start and see where I go. Most often nothing particularly much comes of this, and it’s not terribly hard to see why. I’ve come to find that drawing and painting, much like any other skill, benefits from having some time to warm up, and to plan ahead. It’s pretty rare that I actually take the time to do either of these things, but I’m fairly consistently pleased with the results when I do.

A few weeks ago I spent a delightful Sunday morning alone at my favorite greasy spoon, Big Ed’s. I sipped my coffee, and I slowly nibbled at my bacon muffin sandwich and I read several canto’s of Dante’s Purgatorio. I am decidedly in love with Dante’s Divine Comedy as a literary work, and from it springs probably my favorite pieces by my favorite artist Gustav Doré. It is because of Doré that the idea of illustrating works is incredibly appealing to me. So it was that I read the following lines:

I saw, nearby, an ancient man, alone.
His bearing filled me with such reverence,
no father could ask more from his best son.

His beard was long and touched with strands of white,
as was his hair, of which two tresses fell
over his breast. Rays of holy light

that fell from the four stars made his face glow
with such a radiance that he looked to me
as if he faced the sun. And standing so,

he moved his venerable plumes and said:
“Who are you two who climb by the dark stream
to escape the eternal prison of the dead?

And right away it struck me that I really wanted to illustrate this scene. Later that day I sat down and, with a vague idea of what I wanted, started into it. My first attempt at it was fairly ill conceived, and I gave up on it not too far into it.

I initially stopped working on the piece simply because it was late, but upon returning to it the next day I decided it was not worth continuing on with it. It became clear to me that I needed to put some proper thought and planning into the image if I wanted to achieve the results I hoped for.

So I spent some time thinking about how I wanted I wanted from the image. The biggest problem I had with my first attempt was that the limited scope of the image really diminished the sort of majesty that the text imparted to the character of Cato of Utica. Sure, Dante and Virgil are genuflecting to Cato, but Cato himself is just sort of standing there behind a big clump of odd looking rock. No sir, it just won’t do. With this in mind the next day, during a particularly boring period of work, I did a few quick sketches on post-it pads and quickly came up with a much better layout for the image.

Square is a pretty boring shape for an image though. Wide images are especially effective at conveying a sense of wide open landscapes, and a tall image can very much do the same in respect to the verticality. Being that the location of this image is the mount of Purgatory a tall image seemed best. Plus emphasizing the vertical element of the image helps to portray Cato’s place of majesty above Virgil and Dante.

Happy with the thumbnail sketch of the image, I did a few more of particular details of the image. Here you see a detail of Cato, just a quick rough sketch to give me an idea of the pose I wanted Cato to be in, as well as details of how his cloak wraps around him. The particulars of this image are somewhat of a combination of the text of Dante as well as a statue of Cato the Younger that is in the Louvre.

So with all the prep work done, I began the image itself. I decided to continue using the same tools as I had with the first attempt. As usual used PainterX in conjunction with my Wacom tablet, utilizing a digital watercolor brush. I chose to use solely pure white and pure black colors for the brushwork, all shading being done with a combination of the two colors. The watercolor brush lends itself quite excellently to this process, imparting a rather huge degree of control to me. I feel that with this particular technique I’m quite capable of producing, with enough time, anything I can think of. The limiting factor here is most definitely my own skills and not the tool set I am working with.

I’m not exactly sure how many hours I spent on the final image, I would venture to say at least 5 and upwards of 10, hard to say. I certainly have criticisms of the end result, and maybe another post will be dedicated to tearing myself down, but for now here is the final image, as well as a series of images I took throughout the process of painting. I wish I had taken a video of the whole thing, but frankly I didn’t think about it until after and it likely would have been much to long to do that anyways, as I completed this image in several sessions.

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