Grandpa Dave at My Parents' Wedding

My grandfather looked a little like Humphrey Bogart.

We don't have that many photos of him in his 40's, but the ones we do look like he's stepped right out of Casablanca. I recently ran across one of them, and I thought it'd be really cool to draw him and add him to my Time Travel series. Typically, I'm painting something that happened to me, but this one is from before I was born, at my parent's wedding, where I'm pretty sure they had a professional photographer. 

He was so much younger than when I knew him.

I was lucky to spend a lot of time with my Grandfather in his 80's and 90's (he lived to 103). And though he was young at heart, an inveterate gardener and woodworker, he was so much older than I was. What I loved about doing this drawing and spending some quality time with him was that I could imagine what he was like at that wedding (which was in the same backyard as mine). He looks so proud, but also worried for the couple's future as a dad would be (It worked out fine).

The prints are beautiful.

The original drawing is 17" x 14" using sumi ink on cream colored Strathmore paper. I print them on 22" x 17" archival Hahnemuhle German Etching paper using pigment inks with a 1.5" border on the sides and a 2.5" borders on the top and the bottom. Just buy a cheap 17" x 22" frame and there's no need for a mat. The prints look like lithographs with black blacks and every detail like the original.