My grandfather's name is Richard and he died on April 17, 1995 of complications of a liver transplant which brought on Stephen Johnson's Syndrome. My sisters and I were very young so our memories are very vague, but this photograph however, remained a constant in my family's history. The unillustrated version of this photo hung in the kitchen, in a golden frame, above the stove on a wall that intersected the counter. My father thought of it as his dad looking down over him while he cooked. Growing up it was always there and it was sort of like a subliminal reminder of his existence. I say subliminal because we didn't talk about him everyday, but the photo was always there to catch your eye when walking through the kitchen (we lived in a single wide trailer and you had to walk through the kitchen to get to the last bedroom of the house). I have always thought of this photo as being a "famous" in my immediate family because if we were talking about PeaPaw's (this is the nickname we had for our grandfather as kids) photo we were definitely talking about this one.
As an ode to my grandfather, Peapaw, I illustrated this photo in a more colorful way. The original was some what dull and washed out because of the time period the photo was taken in. Digital imaging wasn't even around this was film. However, it was still brilliant with essence of a man we never
really got to meet, but still existed in our lives.
This illustration took me two years to complete, it wasn't hard, but it also wasn't something that was on the forefront of my priority list. It was something I was going to enjoy doing and I did. Anytime I had some extra time I would work on it. I focused a lot of detailed into him because I wanted my family to be able to look at it and know that this was Peapaw, and they did. When I started this project I was still working with photoshop to do all my illustrating and I finished it out in photoshop. However, illustrator would have been the better candidate for this type of application, but I have no regrets.
