How to Draw Halos for Religious Art

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Jay French, from Jay French Studios. com. Today I'm going to teach you how to draw halos for religious art. There are a lot of styles to go with. Today we're going to use a gold paint marker. They're a lot of fun. You can also use actual paint, metallic paints. Or you can just use, regular paint, regular Prisma color pencils, pastels, but if you want a more dramatic look to like, like an icon, then you...you probably want to go with something metallic looking. This is just an easy way to go about it. Now there are several forms, of course, there's your classic, little ring halo. You can add dimension to that to get your other standard halo. But today we're going to get more of the icon look to halos for religious art. Now there are two major ways to go about this. One is, of course, the classic ring. And you can use a compass, or some sort of guide to get a more perfect circle. Here we're going to use, this is some previous art of mine. It was a logo for Our Lady's rosary rings, of Mother Mary and the Baby Jesus. So you get your classic rings. Now already you've got a classic halo. This was used most often in early European art, but from there you can do a number of details. To get more of a Renaissance period, you want details, such as maybe just some little marks and dots. And you can get....you can take your time and make this a lot more precise. Make that more of a triangle with dots. This is a common one seen in a lot of Renaissance religious art. And you get some overlap here, so we're just going to overview that. And that gives you a nice Renaissance look. You can continue detailing that. You can have a second line. Again, if you use a compass or a guide, you can get more precise with your circles, there. And you can even have outward rays, usually doing them short, long, short, long. But there's a number of ways you can go about that. You can have many all together. Have them very close together. And that's a number of ways of doing that style of ring around the head halos. Now another style, and this is seen a lot in South American religious art, is just the rays halo. And this is where you just get a series of rays that come across the contour of the entire body. And it still gives the impression of the holiness. And these can either just follow the contour and fade out, where the outer edge of the rays is actually following the general contour of the body as well, or they can go all the way to the end of the page. Even to point to where they actually are a circular ray. That takes a little more architecture to work that out. Now see, what I just did wrong there was that I was stroking in the wrong direction. You want to make sure you go from the inside to the outside so that your rays get smaller, these strokes are thinner on the outer edge. And that's two basic ways to do halos for religious art."