Let's talk water... Once I got going in 2016, and drew every single day all spring, on drawings I was selling, I wanted to try something new. Water of most any kind is one of the hardest things to draw or paint really well. Obviously, I have along way to go on that. But these are the tries I've made at drawing water-based photos well. Above, an old photo I found of surfing legend Kelly Slater in a small barrel. It was a decent start at something technically hard to draw.
A while later, I wanted to try another surf related drawing. I wanted to step it up by drawing a really good, and hot, female surfer. I immediately looked up photos of pro surfer Karina Petroni. I gave her and her friends a few rides in my taxi during the U.S. Open of Surfing week in Huntington Beach, California, in 2008. Karina is not only very attractive, and an amazing surfer, but came across as a really cool person. So I went looking for a really good photo of her to draw as my second surfing pic attempt. I couldn't find a surfing drawing that worked really well with my style. But I found this great "duck dive" photo.
For all of you who don't surf, a "duck dive" is when a surfer points the nose of their board down, into the face of an incoming wave they want to pass by. Sometimes they can paddle over a wave. Other times, it's too big or too close, and they "duck dive," like ducks do, diving through the wave. This drawing came out better than the Kelly Slater pic, but it still is along way from awesome. What can I say, water is hard (to draw).
Somewhere in 2016, my BMX friend from the early 1990's, BMX jumper, "Barspinner" Ryan Brennan, started taking time off to go hang out in Hawaii. Before too long, he started posted photos of him free diving, going for depth, swimming with sea turtles and dolphins, and even the occasional tiger shark. As I kept looking on Facebook for people to do drawings for, Ryan asked me to draw this on. On the left is Ryan in a camo wetsuit, coming up from a 66 foot free dive at a place called the Blue Hole, in Arizona. I added the line, "There's another world one breath away." Ryan was stoked on that.
Ryan now regularly dives to depths of about 150 feet on a single breath, and is teaching others free diving and talking tourists out on dives. He has a bunch of great pics on Instagram @barspinnerr. He's given me permission to draw them so sell, as long as I send him some cool stuff along the way. Before the free diving, he built a BMX trick team business, and still runs it, spending part of his time in Hawaii and part in California.
I did another drawing of a sea turtle from one of Ryan's drawings a while back. Then a Facebook friend asked me for an original sea turtle drawing. So above is a close-up of the second sea turtle drawing I've done, form one of Ryan's diving photos. This one was an 11" X 14" original.
I later went back and re-drew another version of the same photo as an 11" X 17" drawing, and I have copies available of this one for sale.
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