It’s easy. First, get some paint brushes. Pawn your chisels if you have to. You can do all your chiseling on the bills from now on. Then, find a pope. Most any pope will do. The ducats are always the same color. Then, select a ceiling. It’s easier and more lucrative to figure prices for your work by the acre than the square yard, so get a big one. If you have your choice of several ceilings, choose the highest one. No one can see the brush marks on a house from the curb, and the same sort of thing goes for ceilings. Buy bigger brushes if you have to. Have forty plasterers on speed dial, of course. They’ll do all the hard work. You just have to lay on your back and daub at the ceiling when they’re done. You’re up about 70 feet above the floor. No one can tell if you’re giving the Libyan Sybil bloodshot eyes, or napping at that distance.
Okay, now give all the women big muscles and prehensile toes. Popes love that shite.
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I recommend you get a pope like Julius II, who looks a lot like Rex Harrison FSR. Then, as an erstwhile Michelangelo, who looks a lot like Charlton Heston, you can paint like the devil on your scaffold, in between parting the Red Sea, and fighting Zombies in LA, on weekends and long holidays. Michelangelo was played by Charlton Heston, in The Agony and the Ecstacy.
It’s a shame when most of one’s knowledge about Michelangelo comes from movies. See also: The Omega Man, also with Heston.
Come to think of it, the Omega Man was more of a prophecy than science fiction. You can actually fight actual zombies there now, should you be so inclined. But just try to put a paint brush to plaster in the Vatican, and see where that gets you. The Vatican has some sick dungeonry and they’ll let you paint the ceilings on there for a song.
OK, where was I? Oh yes – paint like Michelangelo. First, get a huge brick of Carrara marble…sit down, cuz it gets really sick from here. Imagine the effort in carving marble into something like a human, then doing it well, then doing it like Michelangelo. Most humans will never do this amount of work in a lifetime of trying. I met a carver once whose hands were two-hands thick and wide, from the callouses and muscles gotten wielding a hammer. His shop had two industrial hammer mill hammers, with 6 feet of concrete as the backing.
Pull up a chair, this story gets long. Pours you a beer.