Gary Clark Jr. for Rolling Stone

I did this painting last week for the music reviews section of Rolling Stone. It was a quick turnaround. I was called for the job at 3:00 p.m. last Thursday, and the final was due 3:00 p.m. Friday, the following day.

I truly enjoy every chance I get to paint for Rolling Stone, and I enjoy working with the art directors as well. For me, painting musicians for Rolling Stone is a dream come true, it's something I've always wanted to do.

I really enjoyed my time while working on this piece. Like the "blues", I just went for it, painted with emotion and feeling . . . and over all, my goal was to capture character and mood.

It's not caricature, but just as exciting for me. For me the challenge for capturing a person's essence and character is even greater when not caricatured, and so it's fulfilling for me to paint a piece like this and try to capture what I was seeing in my head.




I enjoy seeing how the work looks in print.



These are a few of my really quick thumbnails. The point of these were to help me come up with a nice framing, or composition and because of my short turn around, it had to be done quickly.




This is my color sketch, working out types of colors that I wanted to use.



This is an earlier phase in the painting that I saved to share some of the block in and process.