This is the third sketch I did towards a painting I'm planning of John Paul's ascent to the gates of heaven assisted by Mother Teresa and Padre Pio surrounded by a spiral of the 469 saints he canonised. I needed to depart from the somewhat ordinary representations I had been drawing previously.

One of the first results was an attempt to put a formal, very golden cross as the entrance to heaven, with just two enormous arms reaching out to the viewer in invitation. I imagined the upward spiraling saints as within the vault of a huge building with four massive collumns rising towards infinity. These became the arms of the crosss and transformed themselves into arms and body of christ and the top collumn then performed a kind of magic invertion where the lower part became the upper part of Christ's head. In paint I would hope for this to be truly magical and very 3D so that the viewer feels as if falling into-upwards vertigo. The Christ is becoming the Christ of Majesty.

The Virgin accidentally became more severe than I wanted her to be but the body pose is to my liking in that it emphasises the upwards movement sensation and draws the Pope towards her. She is a glowing figure. My hope here is to imitate Dali's technique as best I can.

Mother Teresa bears children in her arms. One of them holds a stethoscope suggestive of doctors and mdicine. Some of the children are those of fallen women, who I think I will include in the next sketch and show tumbling earthward. Most of the others are abused in some way, mostly by neglect and starvation.

The Padre Pio figure has become interesting. There are very few pictures of Padre Pio, at least on the internet. There is one picture purporting to be of the stigmata but to me it looks/feels suspect. I decided therefore to make the wounds and the blood very visible. Hence his sainthood causes the bindings over his hands to burst open to reveal the wounds. The blood, in mystic drops spirals magically forming halos around the wounds and in a future sketch will mingle with the blood of the other stigmatics to form a stream that flows to a pool in which stands the tree of faith. I'll explore the possibility of locating this pool on the earth's surface and have the faithfull trying to follow the blessed to heaven by climbing the tree.

These figures rise on mystic clouds leaving behind an earth in torment, its forests deliberately set burning, the land depoiled by greed and lack of care, the people massacred by war and pestilence and famine. There is more to be said but I defer till the next few drawings.

I finally got the Angel of the Bullets to hold the correct number of bullets. With the shells these would make a cross but do not.