HCSBSB: The Tabernacle

This view of the Mosaic Tabernacle was actually the first illustration I completed for the HCSB Study Bible. The inclusion of all the tents in the background, which needed to look pretty numerous and vast, presented probably at least as much of a challenge as the tabernacle and associated items and persons in the foreground did. And, as is typical, I got just as caught up in rendering the sky, clouds and smoke as I did in any other part of the illustration. (That’s actually the case with a number of these. Sometimes the clouds and swirling smoke and flames wound up being my favorite parts of some of these scenes when all was said and done, oddly enough.)

This is also one of those scenes (there wound up being several) for which I built a crude model of which I could take some reference photographs from key angles that would serve as the basis for the final drawing. I felt a pretty heavy burden for making sure the relative scales and distances for all the components were accurately represented, and this was often the easiest way to accomplish that.