Hi y’all,

Welcome back to the blog! I know it’s been some time — sorry about that, things have been crazy. Since I last posted, I’ve been working on some new Satanic art for the Milton project, making some progress on the plein air painting, and plotting a new collaboration.

Let’s start with the new versions of Satan I’ve cooked up. I’ve turned the scene from Book I of Paradise Lost where Satan and his legions have been cast into Hell into a Procreate drawing. For a refresher, I had already worked up a conte and gouache drawing of this scene. Here’s that piece below:

Satan, fallen, stands to address his legions in Hell - conte and gouache on paper

As you can see, the first drawing was in black and white. The Procreate drawing was meant to help me think through some of the color questions I’ll be facing when I make this into an oil painting.

Satan, fallen, stands to address his legions in Hell - Procreate

Speaking of oil painting, I’ve finally finished the oil study of Satan’s head. As you can see above, my goal when painting Satan is to get as much chaos in the colors as possible in order to visually depict Satan’s inner turmoil. For the head study, I wanted to capture Satan’s descent into moral depravity, so I started with an underpainting using the Zorn palette, which only has a couple of colors. As I began working in the thick, impasto, chaotic blends of warms and cools, I ran into a problem — as I added more warm, it canceled out the cools, and vice versa, plus I was having trouble controlling my values (lights and darks). Here’s where the painting was when I last posted it:

Nothing a trip to the Met won’t fix! I decided to go poke around the impressionists, post-impressionists, and pointillists, and, sure enough, I found the fix. The key, as usual, lay in massing — creating large masses of light and dark, warm and cool, before adding smaller variations within them. If you look at this Renoir, for instance, the values and colors look blocked in in large shapes from a distance:

Renoir piece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

But if you get closer, you can see smaller variations in color and value inside the masses:

The same is true for this pointillist piece (I failed to take down the artist’s name, unfortunately):

Pointillist piece at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

With that in mind, I came back to the Satan head study. Focusing on massing first, I was able to work in more color chaos without messing up the values. That, plus a little stand oil, and voila, Satan:

My take is a lot more painterly and saturated than the Renoir or the pointillist piece (what can I say, I like big brushes and loud colors), but, if you look closely, you can see the same mass-first-vary-later principle at work:

In some less unsettling painting news, I’ve also been making some progress on the plein air WIP I posted last time:

Between the tropical storms, flash floods, and heat waves, the weather has been keeping me painting indoors lately, but hopefully I’ll be able to get back out there and make some more progress on this soon.

In other news, I’ve got another collaboration coming up with my friend Kevin Shoemaker, a.k.a. Dandelot. For anyone who doesn’t know, Kevin is a really talented musician and producer. Kevin and I hung out in virtual reality a few weeks ago to do some live painting and playing/producing. If you missed it, check out the video below:

Kevin is releasing his debut album at the end of the summer. As part of the album release, I’m going to make a piece of visual art for every song, which I’m really excited about! You can keep up with the project and Kevin’s album release by stopping by his website and signing up for updates.

That’s it for this week! Check back in for more updates soon. Til then, have a great week, and keep creating!

Hi y’all,

Welcome to this week’s blog post! Today, I want to share my thoughts on (eventually) illustrating one of Paradise Lost’s most interesting characters: Satan.

What fascinates me about Milton’s version of Satan is how likable (and, at times, relatable) Milton makes him out to be. Before his fall from Heaven, Satan (then Lucifer, meaning “light bringer”) is the most beautiful, radiant, and eloquent angel. These same traits play a big role in his fall. He’s able to persuade other angels to join his rebellion because his eloquence makes him persuasive. His radiance and beauty lead to a very weird, incestuous affair with Sin, who springs out of his head as a fully formed goddess (for my fellow classical nerds, yes, that’s an Athena-Zeus reference).

In the end, though, it’s Satan’s pride that leads to his downfall. When he first arrives to Eden to tempt Adam and Eve, Satan has a prolonged moment of doubt. It’s my favorite monologue in the poem (beginning of the fourth book, for anyone who’s interested in reading the full thing). He confesses to the reader that “pride and ambition threw [him] down” and wishes that he had been “some inferior angel”, so that he could have “stood happy”. The problem, however, cuts deeper: “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell; / And in the lowest deep a lower deep / Still threatening to devour me opens wide, / To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.”

Satan’s inner torment distorts his outward appearance. As he goes through waves of rage, doubt, and despair, they “[mar] his borrowed visage”. After the fall of Adam and Eve (spoiler alert), God even turns Satan and his fellow angels-turned-demons into snakes.

I want my depiction of Satan to capture both his luminosity before the fall and his gradual distortion through pride, rage, and sadness. This is what I’ve come up with so far:

I’m still tinkering with it, but I like the direction so far. After the last oil study (which you can find below), I wanted to get more experimental with the brushwork, color, and texture — basically, to get more energy in the piece, spice it up a bit. As I painted, I thought more and more about Satan’s dual nature, and, eventually, the two ideas merged into one.

Prepping for the Satanic torso involved a lot of pen and ink studies, most of which I put up in last week’s post. For comparison’s sake, I’ve included them below, along with one more I worked through before starting the oil study.

And, as always, I started with a human anatomy study, which you can find below:

That’s it for this week! I’ll be back next week with an update on the WIP oil study, some more pen and inks, and whatever other art news I have to share. Thanks for tuning in and have a great week!

The many mediums of Satan

Contemplating Satan

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