Category: art

Today’s saint is Saint Alphonsa of the Immaculate Conception, an Indian (Indian as in Gandhi, not Geronimo) nun who was the first Indian woman to be canonized by the Catholic church. Having taken a break of nearly a week since my last picture, I can see my skills weakening with this image.

Mary Magdalene is one of those figures in the Bible who tradition has ended up confusing a bit, thanks to the fact that there are so many Marys in the New Testament. For a while, she was associated with both Mary the sister of Martha and with the woman caught in adultery, but has since…

St Bonaventure Oratory was one of those shadow parishes in the archdiocese which was still in the list of churches that I got from the directory, but had been relegated at some point in the past (trying to determine whether a church has been relegated is its own little challenge, I’ve found with some parish…

Family duties meant that I wouldn’t be able to visit Saint Procopius church today so I decided to draw Saint Procopius instead. He was an 11th century Czech Benedictine monk who was the namesake, not only of the parish on the west side of Chicago but also of the abbey attached to Benedictine University in…

I ended up choosing today’s saint, I went with the Seven Holy Brothers, the children of Saint Felicitas, not because of anything about the brothers themselves, of which little is known and much that is said is likely to be false, but because the picture that I worked from today, taken from an illustration in…

Today’s saint is Saint Mary Zhu Wu, a Chinese lay Christian who was martyred during the Boxer rebellion in China. I continue my experiments with Procreate, although I had a bit of a mishap today. I had created my preliminary sketch in blue but I forgot to start a new layer when I did the…

Married saints are unfortunately rare in the Catholic church and married saints who actually had sex, let alone children, are even rarer, but the Ulma family form one of the rare correctives to this. Józef and his wife Wiktoria and their family hid Jews from the Holocaust in their home until they were all summarily…

Among today’s saints are two venerable Dominican tertiaries, and I decided to go with Catherine Jarrige because she showed a bit of a sense of humor and mischeif in her life. In the years after the French revolution, she worked to protect clergy who were unwilling to swear an oath of allegiance to the new…

I decided to go with Saint Bernardino Realino for today’s saint since (a) I’m partial to the Jesuits and (2) he turned from a career as a lawyer to caring for the poor which seems pretty cool.