Alright, so I’ve been meaning to share this little project I cooked up. It all started, like most of my weird ideas, out of sheer boredom and a bit too much late-night internet. I was just scrolling, you know, and landed on some page about old saints, and man, they all looked so serious, so... saintly. And I thought, what if they weren't? What if there were saints for, like, really mundane, everyday annoyances? That’s how the whole "weird saints" thing kicked off in my head.
Getting Started with the Saints
So, the first thing I did was grab a notebook. I'm old school like that sometimes. I just started jotting down silly ideas. Like, Saint of the Misplaced Keys, or Our Lady of Perpetual Buffering. The sillier, the better, I figured. I spent a good afternoon just brainstorming these. Some were duds, totally lame, but a few made me chuckle out loud, so I knew I was onto something.
Once I had a decent list, I had to figure out how to, you know, make them. I’m not exactly a pro artist, but I can doodle. My first attempts were just pencil sketches on paper. They were rough, super rough. Think stick figures with halos, basically. But it helped me get the basic concepts down. For Saint of the Stubbed Toe, I drew a guy hopping around with a comically oversized, throbbing toe, halo slightly askew. That kind of vibe.
Moving to Digital and Finding a Style
After messing around with paper for a bit, I decided to try and make them look a bit more... finished? I fired up this old drawing tablet I had lying around. Barely used it before, so that was a learning curve in itself. I downloaded some free art software – I think it was Krita? Or maybe GIMP? One of those. Honestly, I just clicked around a lot at first.
Finding a style was tricky. I didn't want them to look too polished, because that would lose the "weird" part. So I aimed for something kinda chunky, a bit cartoony, maybe a little bit like those old underground comics. I experimented with line thickness a lot. Tried bold outlines, then thinner ones. Played with colors that were a bit off, not your typical saintly gold and white. More like mustard yellows and weird purples.
The process for each one usually went something like this:
- Pick a "saint" from my list.
- Do a quick digital sketch, trying to capture the "problem" they represented.
- Clean up the lines (or try to, anyway).
- Slap on some color.
- Add some silly details – like for the Saint of Autocorrect Fails, I gave them a scroll that was just full of gibberish.
Hitting Some Snags
It wasn't all smooth sailing, of course. Some days I’d just stare at the screen, completely out of ideas. Or I’d draw something, and it would just look… bad. Like, really bad. There was this one I was trying to do, Saint of the Single Sock, and I just couldn't get the sock to look lonely enough. It sounds ridiculous, I know! I almost gave up a couple of times. And the software, man, sometimes I'd accidentally hit some key and everything would disappear, or all my layers would merge. Frustrating is an understatement.
But I kept plugging away. Sometimes I’d just walk away from it for a day or two, clear my head. Then I’d come back, and suddenly the solution to the lonely sock would just pop into my brain. Or I’d figure out that weird tool setting I messed up.
The Finished Batch (Sort Of)
So, after a few weeks of this on-and-off tinkering, I ended up with a small collection. Maybe ten or twelve of these weird saints. They’re definitely not masterpieces. They’re quirky, a bit rough around the edges, and honestly, some are probably funnier to me than they would be to anyone else. But I made them. I took this silly idea from a random thought to a bunch of actual images.
I showed them to a few friends, got some laughs. That felt pretty good. It was just a fun little exercise, you know? Didn't change the world, didn't make me rich, but it was a cool way to spend some creative energy. And hey, now I have a patron saint for when my Wi-Fi drops. That’s gotta be worth something, right?
