ATHENA

Talk about mythology.

Among the many requests I receive, Greek-Roman myths definitely occupy a prominent place.

Persephone, Neptune, Andromeda, Zeus, Hera, Perseus are just some of the gods and/or characters of Greek-Roman cosmogony that I have come across over the years. Athena was missing and this guy decided to give me the chance not to miss her.

He was inspired by my previous work: “Zeus’ Wrath”, but apart from this and an attraction for Greek architecture, the idea was actually pretty hazy.

Nothing wrong with that, having carte blanche or almost is always nice, but in this case I would have preferred to have some additional ideas to enrich the composition with something more dynamic, but the client wasn’t very helpful and I’m not going to read everything there is to know about every Greek-Roman myth I have to draw, even if it would certainly be interesting and useful for my general culture 😀

I generally give a quick read to the main features to get an idea of the character and possibly find some inspiration. In this case it came in handy for the realization of the inner part of the arm which, although redundant, portrays the goddess holding a luminous sphere in her hands, representing the wisdom, arts and strategies she will give to humans.

As for the face, I had a clear idea from the very beginning. I absolutely wanted an extreme close-up that would take up half of the arm, it was just a matter of finding the right angle for the client’s slender arm.

Doubts and solutions

The problem was creating a composition for the forearm. The client absolutely wanted something architectural and, speaking of Greece, the Parthenon couldn’t be missing, but the space available was really narrow and while resizing it, taking advantage of a perspective view that would reduce its lateral extension, there was still a large area to fill and having the prominent part of the forearm made up almost entirely of rocks didn’t seem attractive enough to me.

Luckily I came up with the idea of adding a staircase, not as appealing as a more dynamic scene in my opinion but certainly better than a pile of stones.

What fascinates me the most about this staircase is the pillar which, strategically placed, becomes both the right and left side of the entrance to the staircase.

The transition between the lower and upper part was easy. Like I did for “Zeus’ Wrath”, I decided to use clouds. This allowed me to manage the transition without too much trouble, since reducing or increasing the mass of clouds wouldn’t negatively affect the overall composition.

Like a train

The work was fairly quick, it was completed in five sessions with no problem whatsoever, thanks to the guy’s resistance but above all thanks to the dimensions of his arm which helped greatly in speeding up the work.

I’m very satisfied with the final result, I like both the composition as a whole and the individual elements. The client’s light skin tone contributes to the final result, increasing contrast without the need to use white except in a very few strategic spots.

materials I used for the design.

Faber-Castell Grip Plus 1.4: https://amzn.to/3OJIPQ2
Faber Castell 138471 0.7: https://amzn.to/3nonOPi
Staedtler, silver 0,9 mm: https://amzn.to/3nnSznC
Tombow Mono Zero – Gomma di precisione: https://amzn.to/3u50XMw
Tombow Mono Zero – Gomma a penna: https://amzn.to/3nndCXb
QWORK Gomma da cancellare elettrica: https://amzn.to/3u7iOCp
36 x Staedtler Mars Micro Mechanical Pencil Leads 0.5mm in Green, Red and Blue (12 x Leads of Each Colour): https://amzn.to/3w7BWkv
Koh-I-Noor 8915 Progresso – Matite in grafite, senza legno, 6 pezzi: https://amzn.to/3JZI1Fw
Sakura Gelly Roll 3 gelpennen div diktes – wit: https://amzn.to/3Au8x6O