https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=3GuLIcBL2qc
Greetings to all of you. I’m really excited to announce that we’ve reached, I’ve reached the 500 mark, I’m going to ramp things up, start making more drawings, at least two drawings a month. Plus, I’m going to start making videos documenting some of the drawings I’m going to make. And so to kind of celebrate and to start, I thought I would make one of the drawings that the 50 mark, the people who give $50 can ask for a particular drawing. And so I’m going to start with the first drawing that was suggested to me by Joe Vargays. He actually asked me to make something that I promised myself I would never make. When I started making icons, when I started carving icons, I promised myself that I would never make a reproduction of the famous 6th century encaustic icon of Christ. It’s one of the most famous images in Christianity. And it is so particular, so unique that I told myself I wouldn’t even try to touch it. I had seen so many people try to make reproductions of it and fail at capturing the essence of that image. But when Joe asked me, at first I thought, no, no, no, I’m not going to do it. But then slowly as the weeks went on, it was kind of mulling over in my mind and I thought, okay, this isn’t a carving. I made this Patreon project to push myself further and to try new things. And so I’m actually going to try to make this image. And I’m going to document it as I’m going. I’m a bit nervous. I’m a bit terrified, to be honest. But I’m going to spend a lot of time looking at the image and I’m not going to try to make a reproduction, like a photographic reproduction of it. I’m going to try to capture as much as I can of the mysterious aspect of that image. One of the important things for me in making this project was that I tried to be as freehand as possible. There are methods of drawing using grids and whatnot to be exact. And so I wanted to avoid those methods because the purpose that I had in drawing these images was so that I can really focus and kind of enter them into my hand as much as getting a good drawing on paper. So by drawing it freehand, I have to be way more attentive to what I’m doing than if I would use a more technical process. I mean, I guess the puzzle of this image is how to make the image without it looking like it’s two different faces while at the same time preserving the duality which appears in his expression. So I finished drawing. I have to say that the difficulties that I was expecting are the same ones that I faced. At first I thought I was going to be successful, but as I was going through the drawing, especially when I reached the beard and the neck, I realized that the effect that we get from the drawing is based on a very painterly approach. It’s based on an almost impressionistic feeling in the painting. And so it helped me to understand why so many iconographers today fail to reproduce this image successfully because most of modern iconography has a very linear technique. And so it struggles to find where the form ends and where the forms begin. And so what happened is during the drawing, I ended up having to resort to more painterly strategies, especially around the neck and the beard. And so leaving certain parts purposefully vague and gray were the only ways I was able to even come close to suggesting what’s on the image. And so I have to say it convinced me even more in making a drawing of this that I should never attempt to carve it because to reach the kind of vague impressionistic feeling in a carving is not possible. And so yeah, it was a good experiment. I’m not completely happy with it, but I think I did the best I could. So I’ll leave all of you to judge whether it’s been in any way successful. So thank you and I’ll see you on my next video.