Hot Wax Illustration

During my Illustration Techniques class with Mr. Patterson, I was introduced to the work of Chuck Close. Chuck is a ultra realistic painter who specialized in painting people’s faces in gigantic canvases. His work is so amazingly real it is easily mistaken for photographs.

The way Chuck makes such detailed and realistic work is because he makes a grid in front of the photograph he uses as reference. He then paints the picture in a much bigger canvas by making use of a much bigger grid, and then painting each square individually. Transferring the picture from the photograph to the canvas using the grid as location reference and painting square by square. When all the tiny squares are completely filled in as accurate as possible to the reference, you have ultra realistic painting.

I incorporated the same principle in his technique in this illustration. I made a grid on a much bigger piece of paper which corresponded to the grid I made on to of it's reference picture. Then I then started filling in each square with different color markers in a very stylistic way.

The picture is of a professional skateboarder named Chris Cole, who has an imaginary band called Hot Wax. In this photo he looks very much like an 80’s glam rocker, like David Lee Roth or that other guy from Poison. So the style in which I choose to depict him in the illustration fits that kind of music genre.

This project was another chance for me to step out of my comfort zone and try something very different. Because of pieces such as this I feel I’m a much more diverse and versatile illustrator, who can make use of many different mediums and techniques in order to reach the desired objective.