Commissions: Paul's kid

Drawing someone's kid is not fucking easy. Parents, understandably, all feel that their kid is the best and perfect and an astronaut painter left handed starting pitcher, and I can tell you the stress of the artist ratchets right on up if the parent is actively watching you draw(and I mean ACTIVELY, as in real time art direction). It's why many artists, myself included, generally try to find their way out of these requests.

And then there are the drawings that turn out like this one, for Larry's son, that happens to be one of my favorite drawings that I've done...

So...when my buddy Paul asked if I'd be available to do something like this of his kid for his wife's bday, I thought "fuck yeah I can do this. What do you want?"

"You are the artist . I will tell u he loves Star Wars , islanders hockey and his mom ."

OK, I can work with this.

After a couple of rough sketches to figure out idea and placement, I knew what I wanted to do. After laying down newspaper and paint and charcoal, I started the lifework in the top right. With a continuous line, I drew Paul's profile into his wife's smiling face into the kid's curly hair. Now that I'm up to the main focus of the drawing, here's where I spend more time on detail line work. Thankfully, I feel like I got this right on the first try.

The idea I liked just as much as I do the drawing is that the kid is imagining some fantastical story of his guy Kylo Ren, which I tried to show with the white paint leading from the figure in his hand to the deliberately not fully defined ink and oil bar drawing leading you back up to the top. So, I guess the I'll call this "My Kid is Creative(Goddamn It)". Now it feels like a Taking Back Sunday song...