Before & After: Creation

Hello!

I can't begin to tell you how excited I am about this post! For ages I've been trying to get someone to join me in an 'inspired by famous artists' challenge, and when we were throwing ideas around about the next challenge in my Llama Nails Group, enough other ladies had either thought of the idea too or liked the idea that we decided to go with it. This is like a dream come true for me. :)

However...the first week's artist, this week's artist, is Michelangelo. He was such a talented representational artist that the only thing my mind can settle in on that says 'Michelangelo' to me are the actual images in his art. I figured if I let it roll around in my head for a few days, I'd come up with something easier than trying to recreate some part of something he actually drew. But my own personal creative process shut down, and my mind kept returning to one thing: the famous image of God creating Adam in the Sistine ceiling. It just kept coming back, over and over again, and I finally decided to just try it, and if it came out really badly, oh well.

To refresh your memory, here is the image I'm talking about, well, at least the key portion that I wanted to recreate:

To start the mani off, I used a base of Zoya Wednesday, a beautiful light robin's-egg blue creme. I was extremely pleasantly surprised by this polish; I sometimes struggle with the formula on Zoya cremes, but this went on like butter, and almost covered in one coat:

Zoya Wednesday

I picked this polish because my brain, as brains will sometimes do, remembered the background of the painting as being blue. I guess it makes sense that it would, since skies are normally blue. Ah well, not the end of the world, lol. :)

Next I pulled out my acrylic paints and attempted to freehand the hands from the image:

My colors came out a little more sepia-toned than they should have been, I think; I should have gone for something more gray. Anyway, I know it's far from perfect, but I'm really proud of this--keep in mind that in December my freehanded snowmen looked like Gonzo had gone insane and was a serial killer on the loose, and you can see why I consider this to be a huge improvement, lol!

Thanks for looking! Hugs and love,
M.