One of the fun things about the older saints is that no one has any idea what they actually looked like, Our common image of Jesus with his northern European features is almost certainly far from reality, and the other Biblical figures are likewise likely to be incorrectly imagined. Nevertheless, the icon that I worked from for this picture is probably not too far from the truth, depicting Barnabas with curly brown hair. And unlike some other images I’ve seen of Barnabas which have him holding a codex of the Gospel of Mark (tradition says that Mark was his cousin), this one has him holding a non-anachronistic scroll instead.
I’m trying a new approach for the next week or so, starting with pasting a picture into the Freeform app on my iPad and then drawing over that before removing the picture. My inspiration comes from Nicholson Baker’s Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art, where he talks about how tracing photographs led to him getting better at freehand drawing. I’ll see how well that works for me.
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