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Gods at Leisure

Drawing of two figures: seated female nude entwined with snakes and crowned by a fig tree, and a dark male with a masked face, whose only feature is the light which shines from his open mouth.
Hades and Persephone, chilling

I promised myself that I would post here on Mondays and Wednesdays at least. At least! It’s been… not long. Like, one full week? I have fallen into a trap of my own devising, the one that seems to get me EVERY TIME: overthinking it. The anxious thought that I’ve been caught up in is: am I okay posting drawings of boobs? The answer, obviously, is “yeah”. I really love figure drawing, so I draw a lot of naked people, and at a certain point that’s just facts.

I started this as a figure drawing practice, and then I started to play around a little with the imagery. I started to think about a stylized domestic scene from mythology: a little homey portrait of Hades and Persephone. The drawing is a mix of materials, including marker, ink, and colored pencil. Hades ‘mask’ is cut paper with a punched hole that shows that blank white underneath.

I have this idea that I’d love to try reproducing this sort of idea in the larger scale of a painting. It might be really fun to play around with matte and gloss finishes on something like this. I probably won’t actually do it… it’s just hard to look at something that’s “finished” (aka: as good as it’s gonna get) and not thinking about other tangents that might make the idea more exciting.

Also, for something that started out as an anatomy study, there are certainly… issues. Sometimes I get too excited and just start coloring shit. Unless you’re painting in Photoshop, once you’ve laid down color, it’s like you have stepped off a point of no return. The shapes, for better or worse, are in place. This drawing still makes me smile, though.

I hope everyone’s hanging in there!