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!