Greek Goddesses, Phase I

Huzzah! The new and improved blog is back up, shiny and fully functional. A couple of months ago, I started posting about my Greek goddesses project. I’m happy to say that I’ve fully finished four of the five and will write in more detail about their creation process very soon. In the meantime, the finished pieces are up on my Works page. I’ve re-posted the original post in its entirety below.

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I  just finished the pencil sketches for the first five of my new Greek goddesses and I wanted to share them with the good peoples of the world wide internets. First, though, a little background:

I’ve been a huge fan of Greek mythology since I was about five years old, and a fan of beautiful nude ladies for nearly as long. So, this project was inevitable, really. My goal was to render some of the more famous ancient Greek goddesses in the style of American “cheesecake” pin-up art from the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. I’ve always been fascinated by how flawed and beautifully human the deities of ancient Greek polytheism really were. Unlike the God of Judeo-Christian belief, these were not all-knowing, all-powerful, flawless beings. They had very human qualities, very human emotions, and often engaged in very human behavior (love, lust, betrayal, murder, etc.). Despite all of that, they were still revered; an idealized reflection of the society that worshipped them.

Casting these immortal beings as cheesecake pin-ups plays with that notion. Pin-up girls represent a sexually idealized version of the mid-20th-century American woman. Like the Greek gods, they are a bit of a paradox: untouchable, ephemeral, immortal … yet still very human.

While I could probably give the same rationale for casting the goddess as modern celebrities or centerfolds, the former seemed too easy and, frankly, too boring. The latter, too smutty. I didn’t want these to be only about sexy times and naked breasts. The great American pin-up artists had a cheeky humor that is rarely seen in the pages of Playboy or Penthouse. Gil Elvgren, in my opinion, was a master of this. Elvgren’s trademark was putting beautiful women in suggestively absurd situations: endless skirts caught on construction cranes or protruding nails, crabs making off with bikini tops, and puppies scampering away with bath towels.

Each one of my pin-ups pays direct homage to a specific Gil Elvgren piece. I tried to pick paintings that offered opportunities to include visual clues about the goddesses’ identities. Instead of holding a green feathered hat away from an offended parrot, Athena holds her feather-crested helmet away from her pet owl. Artemis is surprised when an arrow pins her dress to a target. Rather than a large Christmas gift, Pandora gleefully opens her infamous vase (yes, in the original myth it’s a vase, not a box). Etcetera.

In addition to all of this, Elvgren is simply a fantastic artist. He’s called the “Norman Rockwell of the cheesecake pin-up” for good reason. He is a master of form, color, and composition. His technique is realistic and clean. Because I could never hope to competently emulate his style, I took some creative license. The final versions of these will look much more like comic book illustrations than oil paintings. I could give some verbose rationale about how a more illustrated, fantastic style compliments the subject matter, but really I just work better with pencil, ink, and Photoshop.

These pencil sketches are Phase I. I plan to document the entire process as I ink and digitally color.

Check back soon for Phase II: Ink.