jack

Cherry Blossom portrait!

I really love how this one turned out, I'm proud of it. The layered leaf effects on the tree look amazing. I like the background too, although I wish I could get it as realistic as the tree with a similar amount of stylisation.

Leather chair

I like the style, I aimed for something I could use for a lightly-stylised style for board game design for "assassins guild annual dinner" game or games with a similar tone, and I think that worked well

Next time I could do shadows better, but this has a good feel

Other art

The other drawings I've been posting this month are on twitter: https://twitter.com/CartesianDaemon/media (scroll back to see pictures this month, most are uploaded drawings) and facebook: https://twitter.com/CartesianDaemon/media I love the dinosaur sunset one, but the sketch garden, the basking coo, and the swirly blue ghost are worth looking at too.

All over Florence there are people on the street selling prints, mostly of the same half-a-dozen famous paintings. Which is interesting to see, because the first set you pass, you recognise a couple, but if you don't recognise the rest, you don't know if they're famous, you just notice which ones are nice.

However, once you've passed several sets, the duplication of the same paintings makes it clear they're a handy guide to the top five most famous paintings with any connection to Tuscany.

One of two marvellously quizzical cherbus (picture) was very striking, that looked like it would be around in the Florence galleries, but I didn't actually know what it was. When I came back, I looked it up.

Except the question of looking up an image isn't always trivial, and can be an interesting exploration of google skills, if you can find it without asking someone. I knew: what it looked like; it was of cherubs; it was famous; it had some connection to the renaissance or Tuscany.

I started by doing an image search for "cherubs painting", and it was famous enough to be near the top hit. However, that only find a picture from people who didn't know the traditional name and called it "Rachel's Cherubs" or "Raphael's Little Angels". A quick check of the titles of Raphael's most famous works didn't show that. However, searching for "florence raphael (angels OR cherubs)" gave the real title, and that was readily accessible on wikipeda.

What I didn't know was that it was the bottom of a large painting, Sistine Madonna, painted by Raphael in Italy, but now housed in the gallery of old masters in Dresden, but became independently famous.