HEY, IT'S NOT DIGITAL!

Did I mentioned how much fun I recently had at the Anime Los Angeles convention in Ontario, California. 

I had a lot of fun!

And I met a lot of great people too. One person in particular caught my attention because of her hair. It was big and fantastic. It screamed, "draw me, turn me into art!" I did exactly that.

Trinity Drayton, thanks for letting me take your picture. Saying “I want to draw you” to a stranger sounds weird at times, even to me, but you didn’t mind the picture taking. Because of that leap of faith moment, here’s the end result!

A friend of mine saw the original and thought she was looking at a printout of a digital art piece. I had to correct her. This is not digital art, there’s nothing digital going on anywhere in this art piece. It is all done the old fashion way, by hand, one circle at a time. It took 5 days to complete, most of the time was spent on the hair. There are 2 layers of ink covering those areas, and that really took a toll on my hand; I had to rest it a lot.

The background was a personal nod to the amazing artist, Takeshita Murakami. I love this guy’s work. Originally I was going to use regular smiley faces of various sizes in the background, but I then remembered Takeshita’s work, and I think these large smiling faces are a better match to go with the large colorful hair.

A few weeks back when I posted the portrait of Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Ben Ratner, a great ideas person, mentioned I should be live streaming the process of how I do these pieces, and that’s a great idea! I will do so someday, but in the meantime, I put together this quick little video of Trinity’s portrait from start to finish using scans.

Working on art like this is exciting, and I wish I could figure out a way to make them profitable as well so I can do one after another. I could live my life like Patrick Nagel or Andy Warhol and just draw people.

Got to make the dream a reality!

WE DON'T NEED NO EDUCATION , JUST A GREAT PANTHER MOVIE!

This week’s portrait, Chadwick Boseman!

Just sat through my first bad movie of the year, “The Cloverfield Paradox”. A huge waste of 2 hours, I should have been working on an art piece, maybe I could have started another portrait on time. The original movie “Cloverfield” was fun to watch, shaky camera and all, and at the end of that movie we all knew what was going on- there was a giant monster tearing up Manhattan. They showed it to us! So if you make a sequel or a prequel, guess what, we already know about the creature so you have to actually write a great story: the real reason why the new movie must exist. Anyway, save yourself some time and read some spoilers. Trust me, you’re not going to be upset if you skip this movie.

This week “The Black Panther” opens! I am excited but cautiously so. It's a stand alone movie, but it is coming in on the heels of Captain America’s “Civil Wars” movie which introduced the Black Panther character, so this new film is really a sequel or a prequel. That said, I hope someone took the time to write a great movie. A real reason for this film to exist other than the fact that it's mostly an African American cast as some movie reviewer pointed out, forgetting to mention if they liked the film or not.

I think Chadwick is a good actor, and I am sure he’ll give the role his all, but he can only be as good as the material he was given to work with. I hope I am not going to see more of "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" way of storytelling, you know what I mean.

This portrait is another huge leap for me as far as how I created it. There’s a lot of color mixing going on using circles, of course. I hope to find somewhere I can show what’s going on with my work beyond these portraits someday soon and maybe start selling originals too.

So here’s to hoping "The Black Panther" is great and fun to watch with good acting and no over the top political social messages being thrown at me. Let me escape this crazy reality for 2 to 3 hours!

By the way, is it me or does it seem Thanos in the “Avengers: Infinity War” movie trailer is a lot less purple in skin color and he now looks like one of those cartoon bulky nazis with a really bad sunburn tan?

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