Happy Holidays!

 I hope you're having a casual post-christmas. I finished my yearly painting in a series I call "Alpha Santa", where I like to imagine Santa shaped by the harsh-environment of the North Pole. This one is called "God Emperor of Christmas". This year, as a departure from the last two years, I wanted to show him in a religious, reverent way. So I went with a centered composition, inspired by this painting from William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

The Motherland - by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

I've been thinking of what to do with the elves for a while, now. They are implied by the arrows in "End of the Hunt I" (the one with the yeti), and last year's painting with Rudolph was originally going to be Santa knife-fighting with the king of the elves. I have purposefully kept from doing to much research into various elements of the Santa myth (like why he gets to boss around a magical race of little people) because I am pretty certain I'd like my own version better.

Planning the composition was really fun. I decided to approach it very formally, placing elements in a very deliberate manner according to two inverted golden rectangle cascades. The result was a symmetrical (both vertically and horizontally) picture, where I got to have a lot of figures and elements. It was a very fun painting to execute. It was also a good opportunity to switch it up from the tilted-action perspective illustrations I worked on for the last 2 months.

Here are the last 2 years' Santa paintings. I like seeing how i'm slowly getting better over the course of time.