PB Rapper

This week's portrait is Snoop Dogg.

At first I was thinking of using different shades of green, but felt it might make him look more like a Martian or an elf. The dark blue being a mellow color worked best with just a hint of green.

A couple of years ago on Late Night with Conan O’Brien I got to do a comedy bit with Snoop. I was to be an upcoming rapper with a demo tape for him to listen to. Of course it was so bad that in the middle of playing the tape, his bouncer picked me up and carried me out of the room. It was a lot of fun!

 

About a year later, he played a part in an incident that happened at work. I left a message on an assistant

answering machine, which the writers thought was funny. They got Snoop to read back my message word for word but in the “Snoop Dog” style. It's worth a listen if you can find it somewhere, guarantee to make you laugh.

I've been wanting to do this portrait of him for a while now.  I love his music and this is my way of saying thanks for being cool and real.

PERFECT DAY

This week's portrait is of Lou Reed.

I've been a fan of his music since my college days. I discovered “Transformer” on cassette while waiting in the NYU music library for someone who was very important to me at the time, she was a music student. So his music in general has a positive and great association in my life.

The last album of his that I bought was “New York”, a very raw look at the city at the time. I wish he was still alive today, I'd love to hear his take on current affairs.

In this illustration I wanted to capture the iconic look of the Transformer album cover but with an older Lou Reed. I probably could have added a few more lines in his face.

I want to end this entry with a quote from one of his songs;

“Avenge yourself he says to me
Avenge yourself for humanity
Avenge yourself for the weak and the poor
Stick it to these guys right through their heads
Well, the fight is my music, the stick is my sword
And you know that I love you, so please don't say a word
Can't you hear the music playing, the anthem, it's my call
And the last I seen of George was him running through the door…”

Words from: “My Friend George”, Lou Reed, 1984

THE LANGUAGE OF CIRCLES

This week's portrait is of artist Diana Leto.

I've known Diana for a few years now, and got to see her earlier this year at Comic Con where I was able to show her in person what I've been up to, in particular, the portrait I did of her. Drawing Diana was fun, especially because of her fiery red hair. Her artwork is amazing. It's well drawn and fun to look at. I am proud to own one of her original pencil drawings which is framed on my wall.

I haven't been dating these pieces, choosing to focus more on creating.

There's a small part of me that wishes I had tried to keep up with posting these once a week though, as I started in the year but somewhere around March my approach to creating my work evolved, I found myself wanting to concentrate more on creating and less on posting.

It's these circles, they are talking to me I don't know how to explain it given I've been doing them for over 20 years with out a single sound from any of them.

And the more I do them, the better I feel, they put me in a trance like state. I find I've been going out a lot less,watching less television, choosing instead to keep creating with my free time even though there's no deadline or some monetary award for them. I just feel the need to keep doing them. I guess as an artist that has to be a great state of mind to be in and I probably shouldn't question and try to self examine too much. Just enjoy the creative process, keep find subjects and people who interest me and incorporated them into this language I am creating on the paper.

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Last week (November 28th, 2016) I posted a portrait of the Joker. I had written a blog entry for it which never got posted.  Below is from last week, titled,

"THE KILLING JOKE"

I thought by now I'd be coming to the end of my 52 blog portraits project.

Early on the creative process took me in a direction I didn't see coming, my work evolved, and I've been having so much fun doing it that I just didn't make much time to post anything.

But I have been creating portraits, lots of them, celebrities, friends, online strangers, adult entertainers, anyone that I found interesting.

“Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I am an agent of chaos.” –The Joker

The Joker has always fascinated me. He would kill endless number of innocent people and yet Batman would catch him, put him in prison, label him insane, let him live to only escape again and start the madness all over again. It was as if he was given a free pass to inflict as much damage to society as possible with zero repercussions.

Such a character could never exist, right?

LOTS OF COLORS!

This week’s portrait is of Lisa Santiago-Read. 
 


It's just like me to start a project and suddenly start another one and then another one and before I know it, I have more projects going on then I can handle or should be doing in the evenings after work. Right now I really should be watching season 2 of Daredevil!

Back in January it seemed like an easy idea to do these portraits but in the few week that have passed I've manage to come up with some really cool ideas, all worth pursuing. That said, I am going to keep up with these portraits. By December there will be 52 unique images, I will make up the missed weeks somehow.

Fashion artist, Hajin Bae was the inspiration for the look of this piece. I discovered her work on Pinterest a while back. I was so taken by her artwork, I did a portrait of her using her style, she loved it.

I love colors, hot cold, primary, secondary, just lots and lots of colors. Coloring coloring books as a kid was huge with me. I still have several of my childhood coloring books. Crayola was the crayons of choice, still have one of my original set of 64 colors, which includes the politically wrong "flesh"  and "indian red" colors.

I think this also explains why my drawing style is very linear, like coloring book art.

Thank you Lisa for responding to the blog! I needed to know if anyone one saw these writings. Now that I know you're reading these post, I'll keep them sane instead of writing about all the crazy things that live in my brain and come out when no one is looking or paying attention.

Now, off to the next project, sleep!

IT’S A FLAT WORLD!

This week’s portrait is of Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

 What if I told you the world is flat!

I decided to use my circles to define the entire face this time around. The colors I used are often colors I see in images of space. Lines were used sparingly, though if this was a bigger illustration like my dot images, I might had done even those lines using circles.

I've always been drawn to circles and dots. I have a feeling someday if we as a species live long enough and grow a little smarter, we might discover that the universe is contained within a ball, that looks like a circle, and it's one of a trillion circles floating in a much bigger ball, that's floating among trillions, in a much bigger ball and there no end to the number or scale of these circles.

Maybe... my art isn't totally my creation, but a code, a message implanted into my DNA by another species of humans billion of years ago, and my drive to create art is just me performing like a computer, putting the information on paper through pictures. Then someone with a scientific drive, will see my work and it will trigger something in their DNA, a thought, an idea, which then takes us to our next level of development.

Eratosthenes, Columbus and the many others who thought the world was round, very possibly were influenced or triggered by something they saw, art maybe?

Sounds like Sci-Fi?

If that is the case, I for one am thankful art existed in their time, unlike this moment in time where art is no longer encouraged and creative thinking is looked down upon.

I picked Neal as my subject because he got me curious about life. After watching and listening to him talk, it started making me think and look for bigger answers to our existence.

Recently I've been seeing articles with people expressing the opinions that the world is actually flat, that science had lied to us. Neal was actual challenged by one, a young rapper to prove otherwise. (This is one of those moments you want to ask, “How the FUCK is this individual making records and has a following?!”)

This along with the new levels of racism of all kinds and disregard of the planet makes me wonder if I might be right, art does play a part in our development as a species and the lack of it makes us dumb!

If I am remotely right about art and its connection to bigger ideas and none of this is fiction, I think we are in real trouble,  just look at the schools.

Thanks you Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and people like you for giving me the parts to assemble a key and hopefully open that door to bigger and better ideas.

I’ll keep putting my circles and dots on paper like Agent Phil Coulson of Shield. Who knows, maybe I am drawing the map to a newer and better world.

BIG IDEAS

This week’s portrait is of astronaut, Scott Kelly.

While most were all caught up with watching post Super Tuesday election news and the beginning of the end of the United States as a superpower, something big was happening elsewhere.

After 340 days in space orbiting the earth, Scott returned on Wednesday March 2, 2016. In my last portrait post I mentioned people thinking up big ideas, I think this is a huge idea. This drawing was unplanned but I was inspired to think outside the box with this one.

This is my first public posted iPad art!

I created this image on an iPad Pro, with an apple pencil, using several different apps. Drawing on an iPad is like working on a piece of glass. It really needs some kind of textured surface to feel right.

There’s a lot of experimenting going on in this piece. I tried to combine my line work with a painting style from the 50s/60s, and a photograph from one of Scott's twitter images in the background. Though now that I look at it, you can't tell what's going on.

I also felt it was fitting to put him in a Starfleet Captain uniform.

Staying on schedule with these portraits is turning out to be harder than I thought. You might have noticed I missed a week. I guess I could just create anything and post it but I really want each one to be interesting not just in the subject for the drawing but in the execution of the art as well.

Plus, last week was the Long Beach Comic Convention, which was fantastic! I posted some pictures on the www.cosplaylifedrawing.com website. I think I've inspired a number of people to start drawing and that's a great feeling. One participant, a 5 year old girl decided to mimic me and she drew the portrait of another girl at my booth.

I felt like Bob Ross, but in my case, I am helping people to see and think through life drawing.

I need an agent ASAP to help me grow these events!

THINGS TO COME

This week’s portrait is of Beyonce Giselle Knowles-Carter.

 

Originally, this was titled, “Happy Valentines Day”, but with the past 2 weeks news cycle, I felt the need to take this one in a whole different direction and make it a little bit political.

Beyonce has been a person I’ve wanted to draw for a while now. What’s challenging about her is that there really aren't many good reference photos of her that haven’t been retouched. I have no idea what she really looks like, and as a result I found it much harder to get her likeness down on paper. I think she’s black but in the majority of her online pictures she looks white with a very even tan. 

I used the Pan-African flag colors to complete the image as a result of the recent drama over a song she released and the costumes she chose to wear during the Super Bowl half time performance of that song. People were outraged and want to protest her choice of costume. It reminded them of the Black Panther movement and even worst according to some, that she is black. Even Saturday Night Live made a comedy video about it.

If any of you get a chance, rent or buy the movie, “H.G. Wells Things To Come”.  

I thought at this point in time we as a society would be on to bigger and better things, kind of like Star Trek the Next Generation. But we seem to be stuck holding on to the past. Fear of color, fear of religion, fear of sex, fear of life. “Things To Come”, does feel a lot like our current society. The solution in this film to dealing with all the people who got in the way of advancement was to gas them to sleep.

On a weekend that’s suppose to be about love, there is so much hatred out there.

Anyway, this project isn’t about my politics, it’s about art. Besides I can’t and don’t have the time to teach a bunch of faith believers the ideas and concepts of God and loving your fellow man that kind of stuff though should be included in all their bibles.

Happy Valentines Day, what ever that means.

Hey, if you want to get away from the human race this weekend, join me at Long Beach Comic Expo for the drawing event I will be hosting.