Peace in the Middle East

This drawing, done for my Drawing From Imagination class, depicts "Downtown Jerusalem" at the time of Christ. "Downtown", or one of the busiest places in the city, at the time was actually right outside the walls of the Temple of Herod, which walls you see on the right (the entrances in the background and above lead to the main court of the temple). The open doors would have been shops. Christ is meant to be a focal point of the piece, though obviously the dove in the foreground is just so big that it has to be the primary focal point. As a friend pointed out and helped me articulate, the doves may well represent the Holy Ghost's workings among the people at the time of Christ, who gained a testimony of His divinity by the power thereof.

As the class title suggests, I had to create this piece using just the laws of one-point perspective, my imagination, and some limited, indirect reference as desired. I used artists' renditions from aerial views of Herod's Temple from a book I got while in Jerusalem, as well as several photos I took while in Jerusalem that greatly aided me in the drawing, though I still had to totally reconstruct it myself.

As far as my process goes, I did a fairly finished pencil sketch, scanned it, and then edited and added value to the piece on Photoshop, trying three different ways of lighting the scene before deciding on the "sunrise" value comp (very bottom), which I took the time to finish (very top).