Greek Mythology Calendar (2021)
The 2021 calendar began without a clear theme. I had done some work on a different theme before settling on me appearing in paintings about Ancient Greek Mythology. It took up way more of my 2020 Christmas break than I would have hoped for.
Towards the end I also realised that I’d lost or deleted a reasonably complex and time consuming image for “The Souls of Acheron” which had my face on a lot of people. I couldn’t bring myself to redo it.
A well placed photo here I think. As was the case with any of these, I had to take lots of photos to get the angle and lighting to match the original painting.
The faces blend in well here too. Both are from me when I was a bit younger.
I thought having my glasses on for one anachronistic image would be fun. This one is also unlike the others as it’s a more modern painting compared to the others.
A face that makes me think I’m pretending to be Bruce Forsyth, saying “Good game!, Good game!”
The painting is “The Birth of Venus”. Venus was the Romanised version of the Greek Aphrodite. The bottom of the image was stretched but it didn’t matter as the calendar graphics would be covering it up.
Not the best of the bunch, but it’s easy to be distracted by the arse instead of my faces..
In the original painting these figures were naked but I didn’t want that for my calendar. Consequently I had to look through hundreds of images of men in underwear to find some that I could adapt to put over these figures. It’s things like that that can make these things much more complicated than you’d think.
In some cases, I kind of improved upon the original artwork. Although my face as the child Achilles doesn’t look well positioned, it was still better than the original because many artists couldn’t get proportions on children’s and infants’ faces right for shit.
I thought I’d give an expression to the viewer that says something like a jovial “Tsk! This is happening again then, eh?”
This was probably the only expression that I tried to accurately match up with the original painting.
My 10yr old face seemed to work quite well as the goddess Hera. Me as an even younger child made a nice fit on the cherub or whatever it is too.
I saved the boozy excesses of this image for December. As with any of these, all of the original faces are replaced by mine.
There may come a time when I run out of ideas or enthusiasm for these types of calendars, but not yet.