Blog Posts - Cavanagh Art

Year of St Joseph - Part 2

19/4/2021

Continuing with St Joseph, here are the 2 most recent images that I have done. Both of them where created with Copic alcohol-markers and water-based pens, with pencil under drawings.

"Most Chaste Heart of St Joseph." This one was made on the first Wednesday of March (2021), because every first Wednesday of the month is dedicated to St Joseph. This was an opportunity for me to do the Chaste Heart of St Joseph justice as I'd only previously done a very small version for CATHOLinktober, Day 19, "Chaste Heart of St Joseph". It was also a chance to try out some Bristol Pad paper that I'd bought earlier.

"Reunion." Showing the reunion of St Joseph with Jesus after the crucifixion and before the resurrection. This was painted in honour of the feast day of St Joseph, Spouse of the Blessed Virgin (March 19), after having the haunting last few words from the poem Limbo by Sister Mary Ada running through my head that day.

Here are the last 2 stanzas from that poem:

And there He was
Splendid as the morning sun and fair
As only God is fair.
And they, confused with joy,
Knelt to adore
Seeing that he wore
Five crimson stars
He never had before.

No canticle at all was sung.
None toned a psalm, or raised a greeting song.
A silent man alone
Of all that throng
Found tongue --
Not any other.
Close to His heart
When the embrace was done,
Old Jospeh said,
"How is Your Mother,
How is Your Mother, Son?"

Until next time, God bless.

Year of St Joseph – Part 1

8/4/2021

Back in December 2020 Pope Francis proclaimed a Year of St Joseph (8 Dec 2020 – 8 Dec 2021) for the whole Catholic Church.
More information about it can be found here, and about prayer to St Joseph here.

Below are the first 3 images of St Joseph that I painted in the Year of St Joseph proper:

"St Joseph and the infant Jesus." The starting point for this image was the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 1, Verse 20; which was one of the prompts from the #Adventus202One art challenge during Advent 2020.
This image in not exactly of the moment described in Matthew's Gospel, but rather of a moment after Jesus' birth when St Joseph fell in love/accepted Jesus as his son for the 2nd or 3rd time.
Also the main inspiration for this image was the idea: if St Joseph had a beard before Jesus was born, how much of it would have been left after Jesus' toddler year (ie. pulling part of Joseph's beard out)?

"The Holy Innocents/The Flight into Egypt." This image was also another inspiration from #Adventus202One, this time being close to the scripture reference: Matthew, Chapter 2, Verse 13–15.
The inspiration for this was thinking about how the recently departed Holy Innocents may have processed with the Holy Family in their flight into Egypt from Herod's persecution, all under the protection St Michael the Archangel.

I just sketched this one rather quickly on some coloured paper and inked it with a calligraphy marker and text highlighters, because I just wanted to get it done and I didn't care how I got it done.
I'd been getting sick of doing so many watercolour pictures in a row and I wanted a break from that medium.

"St Joseph, Protector of the Holy Family." The title for this one basically explains all there is to this picture. Showing St Joseph as the Protector and Shield surround the Jesus and Mary.
Although I must not forget to acknowledge and appreciate @awememento's influence upon this particular painting of St Joseph and the Holy Family.
And her Etsy page can be found here.

Until next time, Happy Easter!

Happy Easter from Bishop Stumbers (Audio)

3/4/2021

Over a period of 37 days and multiple attempts here at last is my first 3D animation in Blender 3D with the assistance of Bishop Stumbers. Admittedly I didn't think his voice was going to be so deep, such is life.

Below is a little gallery of Bishop Stumbers focusing on different aspects of the model. Enjoy!

stumbers: Ash Wednesday, covid-style

17/2/2021

Above is my most recent Bishop Stumbers cartoon, which I finished and posted yesterday (Feb 16).

The idea for this picture began to come together in the previous fortnight over conversations about the new guidelines from the Vatican on how to distribute the ashes for Ash Wednesday during a pandemic (ie. sprinkling the ash on top of peoples' head rather than making a sign of the cross on peoples' foreheads) in a note published on January the 12th (link here).

Among the ideas discussed in those conversations was the fact that some of the more widely recycled memes about Ash Wednesday and the wide variety of cross placed upon the heads of Catholics would be no long applicable under the new guidelines, if anyone thought to think of it that way of course.
And so was born Stumbers' ponderance upon the collect of memes now made irrelevant, and somewhat historical, by the Vatican's new guidelines.

Hopefully next time I can get back to clearing the backlog of blog posts.
Until then, God Bless.

What happened after inktober

3/2/2021

First off I must warn you that this is hardly going to be either a concise or chronologically correct catch-up of all my artwork from the end of October, 2020.

Well, with that brief explainer out of the way here is (below) the final painting from my #CATHOLinktober (2020).

"Title of the Blessed Virgin Mary" was the 31st and last prompt of the CATHOLinktober challenge. As it turned out I wasn't the only artist participating who chose to paint "Our Lady, Star of the Sea".
Before asking God's intercession and throwing a Miraculous Medal, I had no idea which Title of the Blessed Virgin to paint. As such was rather stressed out trying to figure out what the final picture was going to be, but God did proved us an answer.

After I had finished CATHOLinktober, I was commissioned to do a painting of "Our Lady of Guadalupe" for the iWitness 2020 Conference,, in a style similar to what I done previously with "Our Lady, Star of the Sea".

"Our Lady of Guadalupe" is the patron for the iWitness Conference which happens starts on the Thursday before the Third Sunday of Advent, and finishes on that same sunday. I had attended previously attended the 2019 Conference, which had been my first iWitness. During the whole of 2020, the thought of meeting up with previous friends and known face at iWitness had been one of the few lights of hope during the year, and I along with everyone who went to iWitness, as well as the organising team were relieved when it was able to happen under NSW restrictions. Thank you God!

In the above gallery are my photos of the 2020 iWitness Booklet I took when I got home on Guadete (Rose Candle) Sunday.

The iWitness Conference began as a grass-roots way for Catholic youth of Sydney and beyond to keep alive and renew their faith in God and grow deeper in the traditions of the Catholic Church in the afterglow of World Youth Day 2008, Sydney, Australia. It is run by an amazing team of dedicated Catholic youth for the youth, it has been held (as far as I am aware) every year since 2008, and have staked out the 4 days before and including the 3rd Sunday of Advent as their usual set dates. Together they bring in a variety of Catholic speakers to talk on a variety of themes centered around the main theme of that particular year. Such notable speakers have included: Archbishop of Hobart, Julien Porteous; Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney, Richard Umbers; Robert Haddad; Monica Doumit; and many other known and lesser known speakers, priests, missionaries, religious orders and many more.

To God be all the glory!

an etsy beginning

28/1/2021

But before that, a bit of an update.

The 2021 Calendar was published in mid-December 2020, however it took a lot of work to get there. Quite a lot of the Inktober material was used, but there were something like an extra 10 images needed since the Inktober drawings were smaller, and it took two of them to fill a Calendar page.

Then in very late November and early December I began making some of those images into prayer cards with a holy image on the front and a prayer on the back.

When 2021 began there was a bit of brainstorming done about 'What's next?'.
Investigating the possibilities of selling printable downloads of prayer cards via Etsy seemed like a good idea. So after a few days' research and planning that's what happened.

CavanaghArt wasn't available, that's why it had to be called CavanaghArtByVincent instead:
www.etsy.com/au/shop/CavanaghArtByVincent

The starting point was a prayer card suitable for obtaining the indulgence during the Year of St Joseph (8 Dec 2020 - 8 Dec 2021) for praying for the unemployed.

And the next one, with a prayer to St Joseph similar to the Hail Mary, began a week later.

It started out with a lot of hope and expectation, yet it has still to make an impact.

What else is there under the 'What next?' options? I don't currently know.

However due to the increased censorship on social media, I will be from now on giving primacy to the blog, and there's a back-log, (or should that be a blog-log?), of material to work with.

inktober 2020

30/10/2020

I thought I told myself that I wasn't going to do Inktober this year. But then a Catholic theme list came up (#Catholinktober), and I caved in.

It is the reason why you haven't seen much artwork posted here.
There is plenty to share, it is just waiting for some free time to put it on this blog. Instagram, Twitter and Facebook have had daily postings during October.

So here is a brief selection from the last 30 days:

The Chaste Heart of St Joseph inspires love and trust in everyone.

A version of the icon of the Mother of God of Tenderness.

New Testament Character: Ananias getting the message from God that he is to go and visit Saul, the persecutor of the Christians.

For the feast day of Our Lady of the Rosary, a decade of the rosary depicted with a big red rose for the Our Father, ten blue-white roses for the Hail Marys, and a triple golden ball for the Glory Be to honour the Most Holy Trinity. The hands are offering it as prayer, and the twelve stars are there to remind us of the crown of Mary, and her receiving the bouquet.

Charity in action.

Only one more to go, and the theme for that one is a title of the Virgin Mary.

Whatever passes for normal might return soon. :)

First Assignment

16/9/2020

The first assignment for my 3 month mentorship under Giuseppe Castellano was to research the illustrator Jean-Jacques Sempé.
He is still alive, and known for loose ink work, real life settings, minimal colour, recognizable but not perfect depictions of people (for example children have light bulb shaped heads and adults have big noses). Then I needed to reference his style in a mock up of a cover for the New Yorker magazine, including the interaction of two characters and a background.

This is one of my pages of practice sketches.

The next thing was to research covers for the New Yorker magazine. Most of them contained scenes from New York life, or what would be recognized as New York life, or else they were political. At times the spine and mast-head were colours other than black.

So I researched New York, things like 20 things only New Yorkers would appreciate, or 10 jokes only New Yorkers will get. I needed to find either a humorous angle or something I am interested in. The stories of YouTube sensations Pizza Rat and Milkshake Squirrel were intriguing.

I put together some thumb nail sketches:

1. Pizza – Rat: Going to the Cinema with Dad.
2. Abbot and Costello on TV with child watching.
3. Father and child on a Ferris Wheel at an amusement park.
4. Child peering over subway platform to see train.
5. Child chasing after parent in front of giant destination board.

Of these thumb nails, Pizza – Rat won. This is a scan of the ink work, below.

The next step was to get an idea of colour values digitally before putting any watercolour on.

Then came watercolour. This is the raw image below:

I then had to clean up the art work and remove/fix mistakes from inking, in Photoshop.
And then add the copied masthead from a previous New Yorker cover, via Google and Photoshop again.

This final art is shown at a smaller size than actual size.
It had been quite a while since I used non-digital media, I had forgotten how nerve wracking it is when there is no room for mistakes.

#IllusDept #mentorship #Sempé

decoding the memes of bishop stumbers

29/8/2020

At last the comic strip is finished, and I can share it with you.

But there is some other news I can share with you as well.
The first part you may have already noticed: this website has had a bit of an overdue face-lift. I hope you like the changes.
The second part is that I have begun a 3 month mentorship with Giuseppe Castellano from the Illustration Department. My first session was this week, and I have begun my homework in preparation for the next session.

For the comic strip, I will give you each of the four parts separately,
and then how it looks as a whole.

Each of the parts took many days to complete.

But I am very happy with the completed outcome.

sketchbook rambles

31/7/2020

Much of what I have been working on during July hasn't been finished yet, so I have decided to share with you a bit of a ramble through my sketchbook instead.

The first one is a series of sketches of Bishop Stumbers from which I started building an animation. That animation is far from finished, but there is a draft version of it on Instagram (@cavanaghcreative). In it you see Bishop Stumbers walking along engaged in social media activities on his phone, until he walks into a wall, recovers, and continues tweeting etc.

The second one is of a coffee addicted robot, or coffee-bot.

The last one is a new character in a classic heroic pose.

I've also been working on a 4 part comic strip, but it is only about 70% completed. Each part is 3 panels wide. I'm currently wrestling with how best to share it online because Weebly displays vertical and square images much better than horizontal images.

Since April 2020 the regular emailed newsletter has been in hiatus. For the last few years the list of whom we send it to hasn't been growing, in fact it has shrunk a little due to deaths here and there. Given that no one has been asking why it is missing, it seems to be the right decision to let it lie fallow for a while until there is a good reason to re-start it, eg some very positive news to share.