Medieval Art
One of my great interests is art history, and let me just say that I have had several years of lessons in history of the arts. I was also taught this on my graphic design course, and was given fun, creative assignments during these classes. The best was this one: making an illustration in medieval style. Medieval paintings often tell one story, with only one illustration, and so it was up to me to also tell one story with one illustration on a then current topic.
At the time I had to create this image, Queen Elizabeth II had just died and (at the time) Prince Charles III was to be crowned King of the United Kingdom. I tried to illustrate the story of the former queen’s death as clearly as possible in the image for this school assignment.
Before I started sketching the illustration, I first analysed typical medieval paintings, in order to mimic the style as best I could. Especially the faces and bodies of people in medieval artworks, have a typical style. I reflected these in my own work.
After sketching the image, I started giving it colour, and in the shades most commonly used by the old masters of the arts. I made the earthy tones recur a lot in the image, to make it look as medieval as possible.
The finishing touch was adding the faded text to the background of the image. Crazy sequence, you might think, to draw the whole image first and then create the background. But with digital illustrations, of course, it doesn’t matter! In fact, I did not draw this image analogously, but with Procreate on my own iPad. Thus, I created medieval art in the present with modern technology.
See the picture below for the final result!
