Tag: St. Nicholas

Art Vs. Artist Again

It’s appar­ent­ly that time of year, when artists look back and post a sam­pling of the work they’ve done the pre­vi­ous year in this for­mat on social media. I’ve been see­ing some of these pop­ping up on LinkedIn the last few weeks or so, with the #ArtVsArtist hash­tag. Look­ing back, it’s been awhile since I did one (2020!), so I thought maybe I’d do it again, join in on the fun.

Any reg­u­lar vis­i­tors here will prob­a­bly rec­og­nize sev­er­al of these from posts I’ve made this year. I debat­ed using a more cur­rent image of myself in the cen­ter, but ulti­mate­ly decid­ed to stick with the same one I used last time. It’s a 12-year-old me, and if you saw the whole pho­to, you’d see I was attempt­ing to do a paint­ing (in oils, no less!) of the USS Enter­prise from Star Trek (the Orig­i­nal series, of course). We all have to start some­where (though the truth is I had been draw­ing for years even before this).

Any­way, thanks for stop­ping by, and a Hap­py New Year to you!

I Knew in a Moment It Must Be St. Nick

Long­time vis­i­tors to my site might recall I have a tra­di­tion around this time of year of doing some­thing San­ta Claus-relat­ed. For awhile, I was­n’t quite sure whether I was going to be able to make it this year, but here we are! It’s a Christ­mas mir­a­cle! (Okay; not really)

This is an unusu­al one. I was work­ing on a Christ­mas-relat­ed project these last weeks that real­ly kicked my butt chas­ing the dead­line. It required a lot of research, and I had to work kind of at or beyond the extent of my abil­i­ties. Sort of out­side my com­fort zone, as I’m real­ly more of a cartoon/comic guy. But as is some­times the case with real­ly chal­leng­ing projects, this end­ed up also very rewarding.

This image was one of the illus­tra­tions gen­er­at­ed for the project: the real St. Nicholas, 4th cen­tu­ry bish­op of Myra (in mod­ern day Turkey). Also known as Nicholas the Won­der­work­er, he was the real life basis for San­ta Claus. Based on what images I could find online (like old icon paint­ings), I thought an illus­tra­tion with the two of them togeth­er would make for an inter­est­ing comparison.

So in a way, this year you get a “twofer” of San­tas. I guess that’s all, except to wish all my vis­i­tors a very Mer­ry Christ­mas, and all the best in the New Year!