"I SEE NORMAL PEOPLE"

This week's portrait is of Nicole Clarke!

Who?

Nicole works at Conan, and was ground zero for this project. One day she had her hair done in a way that reminded me of art work done by one of my favorite illustrators, Patrick Nagel. She didn't know who Nagel was, which was shocking from my point of view.

I decided I was going to do a portrait of her in his style. I've done Nagel like images so many times in the past that this wasn't a challenge as much as it would be fun. While thinking all this through, I thought I'd start a series of images of other people in his style but where's the challenge, this comes way too easy, it would be better to try changing the drawing technique every week instead. And that how this weekly project was born the week before Christmas.

It then dawn on me, how would people know if the likeness was close to the actual person, so I decided I'd do celebrities, people that are familiar.

But there's a huge down side to doing celebrities. For the most part, many are so used to people praising them that they tend to be un appreciative of things given and done for them. Where as normal people cannot express enough how thankful they are to get a piece of art done of them. To see the happiness in their faces and voices is priceless!

Mentioning normal people, in a few weeks I will be doing my life drawing event at the Long Beach Comic Expo here in Los Angeles. At their last convention in the fall, I drew close to 40 portraits. I wasn't prepared for the number of people who wanted me to draw them, so I had to turn away a good number of people. This time, I will have extra paper!

And lets not forget the main reason for the drawing events, it is to get people of all skill levels to experience what it's like to draw from life, discovery their creative selfs, and letting that way of thinking mix into their business, making them better problem solvers. Have questions or doubt my logic, come to one of my drawing events.

48 more weeks to go, who's next?