To Egypt (2020)

Establishing Shot

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Owing to the very tight timeline on this book, and knowing there’d be an end-of-project revision period, rendering everything in full color seemed like it would have taken too long, so I opted instead to paint in a blue-gray-brown palette which would indicate strongly to me warm and cool temperatures for when I overlaid color digitally.

I painted this color swatch to give me a sense of the range of colors that were available to me on a scrap of the canvas I was using. I painted entirely in Titanium White, Prussian Blue, Burnt Umber, and Ivory Black.

I could have saved a little more time with straight monochrome grayscale painting, since painting in one color is always faster than a full palette since there are fewer choices and adjustments. So I opted for this middle-ground. Thus, the paintings themselves are essentially temperature-controlled value studies, and in large part do not pop as the color images would.

To Egypt, digital over oil

The establishing shot here gave us a sense of the who and where of the story: in this case Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus during their flight to Egypt. And a donkey—we’ll return to him in a second. The majority of the book would be closer-in on all the figures, so this was the one chance to pull the camera out and gain a sense of the environment more.

This tiny thumbnail in pencil was overpainted digitally and submitted for approval.

After submitting the rough above, I received approval and got to work. Because I anticipated some pose changes, I didn’t want to photograph all my figurative reference and then have to re-do it (again, time!), so at this stage the donkey was requested to be added. The entire time we were working, a follow-up book was also in mind, and the illustrations within would interact with this story explicitly. So there was some continuity that required the donkey, though he is not mentioned in the text!

After all the sketches were approved I arranged for the photoshoots. But as there was no time to spare, I began working on the paintings in the interim, painting some of them as backgrounds over which I would overpaint the figures later. Again, this is all winging it to hit the shortest deadline ever.

In-progress: I worked on canvas for all of these, with gray gesso since most of the images were middle-toned to dark. A couple of the lighter images towards the end were done with lighter gray gesso. You can see the most minimal underdrawing in white charcoal.

In-progress, the environment finished.

In this case I think the Donkey request came shortly after, as I had finished the background here already at the point where I digitally roughed the new figure arrangement on a photo of the finished background:

Revised figure sketch over the painted background.

Finally, I was good to go and completed the painting. A few of these spreads, particularly ones with smaller figures or more environment, were larger at 12x18”, the rest were smaller, even much smaller.

To Egypt (2020), 12x18” oil on canvas.

From there, it would be digitally colored and adjusted later. This series of posts is the first time I’m showing the source paintings. As they are Christmas-related, we’ll leave off on this series until next year. Until then, Merry Christmas!

To Egypt appears in The Spider Who Saved Christmas, 2020.