Happy Birthday Leslie!
This is the project I was busy with the last couple of days. It was a personal commission from Judd Apatow to give to his wife Leslie Mann for her birthday yesterday. Judd originally contacted me back in December with an idea to do a comic book style page telling a story from Leslie’s life, but we never connected with a script from him and after months of not hearing back I figured the project was dead. It happens.
Then Judd calls me this weekend with the idea of doing a big group illustration of Leslie surrounded by himself and their daughters, plus about 30 co-stars from her many films. Unfortunately her birthday was only 4 days away at the time we had this conversation.
So, I banged this out in about 3 days. It’s done on a 16″ x 20″ piece of Strathmore 500 ply bristol with sepia ink for the lines, watercolors, Dr. Martin dyes, and some touches of colored pencil, marker, etc. I would have loved even just another day to work out some of the caricatures better, and to deepen the painted values, but it had to be on its way by 8 pm Wednesday via FedEx so he’d have it Thursday AM. This is as good as it was going to get.
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Geeze Tom, I don’t see how it could be any better. Fabulous!
Wow, that’s super impressive!
Being able to complete the painting in such a short time shows just how great an artist you are. Well done!
Insanely good coupled with unforgiving deadline – Amazing!
When I saw this I was thinking it had to be digitallly done for that time frame. To have done such a big scene all by hand, with ink and paint, is incredible. It shows what a master artist you are. Well done and thanks for sharing…
I’ll take your word for it that it could have been better.
Incredible!
I know you hear this all the time, but you are some kind of marvel!
I was already impressed when I assumed you colored it digitally. Now that I know it was watercolor on paper, I’m floored. Amazing work, Tom.