Relax…the inflammatory title is just to bring attention to @DeadManDriving ‘s amazing skills! If you don’t want to read the details here are the cliff notes: I highly suggest you reach out to him if you are interested in a custom binder! I couldn’t be happier!
After seeing a binder he made for his Secret Santa recipient a few weeks back I shot him a message to discuss a binder for my small but growing Butterfree collection.
I was literally about to pull the trigger then I just so happened to receive my Secret Santa gift from @niece which contained a stunning Butterfree illustration she made! I felt terrible flipping the script on the deadman after the work he put in on the original concept but the heart wants what it wants.
I wanted the illustration to be front and center so deadman polished off the wingtips and sent me some concepts. He was unsure how the dandelion fuzz would come out but at this point I had already decided to run it.
I thought we were just showing off the insides of binders of stuff that we keep all our expensive stuff in and I thought I’d lose , so I scrolled saw the rest of the binder and realized, yes, I still lost.
It was a privelege to stand on the shoulders of our resident giant @niece and their BEAUTIFUL piece. I did my very best to capture as much as I could in it, but of course, nothing even comes close to comparing to the original!
A little unprompted history, when I was young, I of course was obsessed with Pokemon. I used to want to be an artist so bad, and I dreamt about making my own pokemon artwork. I bought this at a Scholastic Book Fair at my elementary school and would spend hours and hours with lined paper tracing all the Pokemon out of it.
It was one of my absolute FAVORITE activities. The problem was, I had and still have relatively shaky hands. All my lines come out shaky and uneven when I use a pen or pencil. Heck, I type on my phone most of the time here, and if you look through my comments and messages, you would be hard pressed to find any that didnt have a typo from where my thumbs twitched to the wrong darn button I more or less gave up on any art of any kind for most of my life because of it.
Fast forward to about 6 months ago, I found that there was a digital tool in an art app on my tablet that had a way to correct for my shaky hand, and with a bit of practice, I was able to start tracing and recreating some of these old pieces again! I bought a small laser engraver, then upgraded, and have been doing this ever since. I am by no means an artist myself, but it is SO much fun to recreate the artwork of real, genuine artists like Niece. So here I am, completing the cycle I started at 7 or 8 years old.
I am THRILLED that you like the binder, and I love to see how you filled it! It was such a pleasure to make it for you and to be a small part of your collection
I more or less gave up on any art of any kind for most of my life because of it.
