Allo? Statue?

On a number of our vacations I’ve taken tons of photos of paintings and sculptures with the intent of challenging myself to paint something difficult. So, after the Monet challenge turned out well enough I started flipping through the photos for the next project and found Apollo.

From what I recall, this is actually a Roman copy of a Greek Statue and many of these marble works had supports built in to keep the appendages from falling off. I also hadn’t noticed the little lizard when I took the photo, so I headed to Google and searched for other photographs of the statue that might make the creature a little more visible than it was in the shot I took.

I ended up finding out that Apollo was known as The Lizard Slayer and this little guy is about to die – who knew, the Greeks needed a god with a vested interest in killing lizards?

It also helps that I didn’t have to depend on a male nude to pose for a couple of weeks while I tried to get proportions and shading somewhat close. Now, Apollo’s fingers were particularly difficult to get to a point that I could at least say they sort of look like fingers.

It took me a lot longer than I expected to get the shading correct. I was biased toward stark shades of black and white, then I tried some browns and yellows for some off tones, but nothing seemed to work until once again I realized – when painting black and white, you need several (maybe even fifty) shades of grey.

The background was originally all dark when I started out, but I thought that contrast made it more difficult for the shade to work, so I decided on tossing in the blue.

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