Noah's Site

Click for large ver­sion (2.53 MB)

This is actu­ally a really old assign­ment, but I just haven’t gotten around to post­ing it till now.

While it seems odd to do some­thing as phys­i­cal as paint­ing for a class ded­i­cated to work­ing with Adobe InDe­sign, it was actu­ally a quite edu­ca­tional. The point of the assign­ment was to teach basic color theory, and our teacher really likes paint­ing, so the two were an obvi­ous match. She decided to work with a project that the paint­ing class was doing at the same time, which was to create a paint­ing of a bib­li­cal scene in the stained glass style.

I started by brain­storm­ing some ideas of some epic scenes, dis­re­gard­ing fea­si­bil­ity at this point. I had a few in mind, but ulti­mately set­tled on this one for it’s sim­plic­ity. This scene is from Exodus 17:8–17, when the Israelites  defeat the Amalekite army:

The Amalekites came and attacked the Israelites at Rephidim. Moses said to Joshua, “Choose some of our men and go out to fight the Amalekites. Tomor­row I will stand on top of the hill with the staff of God in my hands.”

So Joshua fought the Amalekites as Moses had ordered, and Moses, Aaron and Hur went to the top of the hill. As long as Moses held up his hands, the Israelites were win­ning, but when­ever he low­ered his hands, the Amalekites were win­ning. When Moses’ hands grew tired, they took a stone and put it under him and he sat on it. Aaron and Hur held his hands up—one on one side, one on the other—so that his hands remained steady till sunset. So Joshua over­came the Amalekite army with the sword.

Then the LORD said to Moses, “Write this on a scroll as some­thing to be remem­bered and make sure that Joshua hears it, because I will com­pletely blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.”

Moses built an altar and called it The LORD is my Banner. He said, “For hands were lifted up to the throne of the LORD. The LORD will be at war against the Amalekites from gen­er­a­tion to generation.”

Once I had decided on a scene, I started sketch­ing small size con­cepts, trying to get the pro­por­tions of the people right. Humans are hard to get right! Once I was sat­is­fied, I did my final full size sketch on an A4 page and trans­ferred it onto larger thick stock for paint­ing hence the lack of any real bound­aries. Then, I went over the lines I had to define where the paint was going to go. The next step was to choose the color palette for it. I set­tled on a colder, blue-​purple for the cliff face to con­trast the warm glow above. The most annoy­ing thing about this project was the mixing of the paints. I haven’t ever mixed paints with a goal in mind before, and get­ting enough of every little dis­tinct shade that I needed for each cell was an exer­cise in patience.

At the end of the project, the paint­ing stu­dents poured a black ink all over their paint­ings, then washed off the col­ored parts, leav­ing the white. Unfor­tu­nately, this process turned their beau­ti­fully col­ored, bright paint­ings dark and dirty-​looking. When I saw that, I requested to not have this process done to my piece, since I liked how it was already much better. I real­ize that Moses doesn’t have his staff in my paint­ing, but I didn’t look up the ref­er­ence while I was doing it, and I prefer the empty space above his head better then having a stick there.

Down­load huge ver­sion (1615×2569, 4.31 MB)