Lil Wayne for Rolling Stone

Here's my first of hopefully many portraits for Rolling Stone. I am having the time of my life. Working for Rolling Stone has been a goal of mine for some time now, it has been a dream of mine since I was at least 15. So to finally have the chance to paint for them was an awesome experience to say the least. I'm also very glad that they wanted me to paint a portrait rather than caricature, as it is something that I would like to do more often.



Here's a close up for all you detail lovers out there! BTW, I was called by RS Monday morning and finished the painting early Wednesday morning.



My sketch.

Monday Morning Warm Up Sketches . . .

Monday morning warm up sketches . . . I normally don't sketch baseball players but it's great practice sketching outside of your comfort zone. This was a lot of fun, I think I'll try to do this more often? Each sketch took around 20 to 30 minutes to do.

They Call Me Mad-Book Cover

This is a cover I painted nearly a year ago for Penguin Group, Berkley Trade. The book won't be out officially until December 7th, but until then you can pre-order by going here.





Like most jobs, this too was a very short deadline, I believe I had a four days from start to finish? The funny thing, is that I painted this last December, 2009, and as mentioned above the book won't "officially" be available until December 2010! The more work I do, the more I feel that we, as artists are never going to have the most perfect situation or circumstance to work with? So, I do what I can and I do the best that I can with what I have to work with . . . making the most of everything!

The art on the actual cover for this book will print quite small. I believe that the characters will be 4" in height? So, no need for too much detail . . . for me, it was more important how the image looked smaller and at a distance than how it looked zoomed in and up close.
One of the challenges for a piece like this is that all the references for these two fellas are in black and white. This was also part of the fun.