Two artist friends

Yesterday I had a debate on my Facebook page with Michael Joseph about whether copying a reference photo but changing things artistically, is “stealing". Michael is a highly skilled and very knowledgeable professional artist, and we have been friends for over 40 years!

This is a drawing I did of Michael painting on the Laguna Beach boardwalk, an art colony in southern California where we both started our artistic careers, around 1980. I have a watercolor sketch of myself that Michael painted around that same time period. We both captured those quick depictions of eachother spontaneously, without asking eachother to.

FOR ARTISTS:

This is a single-color drawing (dark-grey pencil on white paper) except for the paint and hibiscus flowers. 

As many colored pencil artists know, I work exclusively on Canson paper, which has a textured side and a smooth side, and I work on the smooth side, which allows me to get very fine detail. This is a rare example of working on the textured side, which I do deliberately sometimes, to get that texture in the drawing. You can see the “honeycomb” texture of the paper in Michael’s legs and the shadow on the ground. This is a simple drawing rendered quickly with a minimum of lines. 

🎨 Prismacolor pencil on white Canson Mi-Teintes paper.

Drawing made in 1985 from a photo of Michael I took a couple years earlier.