Jairus's daughter's outfit

I recently published a PowerPoint presentation about Jairus's daughter.

It was a wee bit tricky designing her outfit. You want the colours and design of the scene to in some way reflect the mood of the illustration, or, at least, not clash wildly with it. This will, of course, include the clothes worn by the characters

Fine - except if the same outfit has to be used in two consecutive pictures, one showing her dead (which would be best complemented with dull-ish colours, and a cool palette) and one showing her alive (as vibrant as possible)!

Here was my solution:

The purple top works fine with the sad picture. However,  when you combine it with the orange skirt, it's certainly bright - not to say garish! (But I think a 12-year-old can get away with it.)

I also gave her straightish hair because it could either lie limply or swirl about a bit.

I got her outfit from the wall-paintings in the synagogue at Duro Europos in Syria. (They're a slightly later period, but some clothes are certainly the same as 1st century, and it's better than nothing.)

Abraham

I wrote this a while back and never posted it:

I'm about to start a new series of illustrations on Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I'm trying to design the characters properly, as I did the 12 disciples a while back. However, I'm finding it a lot more difficult to get a sense of these characters. It's hard to nail them down.

I think one reason may be that it's a different kind of writing. The gospels were written by people close to the events - by the disciples themselves, by people who knew them, or by people who knew people who knew them. Genesis is different: Moses was writing six or seven hundred years after the events (presumably based on early written or oral sources, but there's still not the same immediacy).

Perhaps partly because of this, the two types of writing have a very different feel. Genesis - particularly the story of Abraham - is epic. You get the sense of long distances travelled, sweeping views, vast starry skies, heroic battles. We are rarely in a city or even a village. Although you know there are a lot of people around (Abraham has a large entourage, including a private army of 318 trained men!) you get more of a feeling of a solitary hero.

The gospels are much more homely in feel - village life, city streets, jostling crowds, ordinary people. Although some of the travel is similarly extensive, even over some of the same territory, it feels much smaller and more enclosed.

And you know, that makes sense. When God chose a man, he made him great. But when God himself came to earth, he didn't come as a respected tribal chief with great wealth, many servants and a private army. He came as an average working class man from an unimportant town.


(You can see the pictures I ended up with here - click on buttons:)

Beni Hassan nomads

If you are not as excited by this as I am, evidently you don't spend your time obsessively researching ancient clothes... You can click it and zoom right in!

Unfortunately, it's not the original, just a painting copied directly from the wall in the 1930s. But any photos I've seen of the original have been rather small and blurry:
 

Picture by Kurito

Picture by Kurito

I have often used these pictures (or copies of them) as reference - would be great to see the real ones, though!

 Anyway, better get back to work I'm actually supposed to be doing...

The women

Character sheet of Jesus' women disciples.

Just done in pencil, as this actual picture won't be used - it's just a reference for me. Like the men, I have based them on what we actually know about them, what we can  guess from what we know - and a great deal of imagination.

I'm assuming Mary Magdalene is Martha's sister Mary. There are arguments both for and against, but in the end I had to make a decision, and those two Marys seem similar in character. I'm assuming 'the other Mary' is both Mary the wife of Cleopas and the mother of James & Joses. And I'm assuming Salome is James & John's mother.

Jesus figure

Here's a Jesus figure to go with the 12 disciples character sheet.
A couple of people have asked for one.

(new version uploaded 13th Sept 2014)

After posting this, I realised that it may not be what people are expecting when they ask for a picture of Jesus! It's not your typical picture, but it's how I'm drawing Jesus at present, so I'm used to it. 

There is a reason for all the things that might be considered 'strange'.

There's nothing in this picture that would tell you it was Jesus unless you knew. This is deliberate:

• He is ordinary. Humanly speaking, Jesus was just an ordinary, working class man.  There was nothing special-looking about him. I have deliberately made him as average as possible.

• He is a man. Obviously very few people would argue with this in theory, but so often he is portrayed as a sissy. A 'girl-with-a-beard' as I heard this type of picture once described! Masculinity is not somehow less spiritual, and it's unhelpful to imply that it is.

• He is middle eastern. Does an average middle eastern man have lily-white skin, blonde hair and blue eyes? Why do people draw Jesus this way? Especially when they draw everyone surrounding him in a realistic manner. The implication that fair skin is somehow more holy is dangerous. 

•  He is not wearing white. At his transfiguration, his clothes 'became white'. The implication, I think, is that they were not white to start with (nor is it likely they were off-white; ancient people had much simpler colour vocabulary than modern English). White is also an impractical colour when travelling! I have chosen red for two reasons: a) it is symbolic of blood, and b) I often do main characters in red to stand out. Any story Jesus is in has him as the main character.   
• He is wearing a short tunic. He is an ordinary working-class man, and archaeological evidence appears to show that short tunics were the norm at the time. Jesus didn't think much of people who dressed in special clothes to look more holy, so we can assume he didn't wear anything out of the ordinary.

• He has short hair. There's no reason to suggest Jesus would wear his hair differently from anyone else. (Sometimes people think he was a Nazirite, but he wasn't - he was a Nazarene: i.e. someone who comes from Nazareth.) It seems that short hair was the norm at the time. The reason I have drawn his hair curly is simply to be different. I don't think it's helpful if all pictures of Jesus look the same - no-one knows what he looked like, but we can recognise a picture of Jesus at a glance - this is silly!

Ripping off old paintings

Rebekah goes to the well.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau Young Girl Going to the Spring (1885)

 I wonder if he'd be flattered...?

Edit Nov 2012: Looking back at this, I see I got the pose wrong. The contraposto isn't right. Will redo before publishing.

Edit July 2014: Ooops - I never did! Well, it can wait until  I've got a lot more new stories up.

Character sheet

The 12 Disciples (updated version) Click to see larger.

There are reasons for most of their appearances - some very tenuous, but it helps to get variety. I'll post proper character sheets for each of them some time - this is just a sneak preview. 

I've never actually designed all the disciples before. In my regular work, I have a set of clothes/hairstyle/facial features I always use for Peter, John & Matthew, and the others are just drawn out of my head (if you counted all the different ones I've drawn, they would be more than 12!). But none of them have any character. But for these pictures, I researched what was written about them, and made them into real people.

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You may use these pictures for personal use (e.g. a Sunday School class). Please do not publish them in any form, sell them, post them elsewhere on the internet, add them to an image library or do anything else with them. Thanks!

If you would like individual figures, you can download for free here.

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Edit: I have now done a Jesus figure too. 

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Edit II: These pictures are part of a PowerPoint:

You can now buy it by clicking here.