dW

Too Much Coffee

There are times in which I go for long periods of time without illustrating a single thing worthwhile. I’m a graphic artist, and I feel perfectly at home designing webpages and whatnot. I tend to use illustration to calm myself down. I don’t really need to churn numbers, CSS properties, and HTML elements in my head while illustrating. I can sit down at the computer and paint or draw away using my Wacom tablet. Before I know it it’s 6 hours later, and I’ve listened to the same Rush song about three times because the playlist has repeated itself. This weekend I thought it was time to tell everyone to go to hell and lock myself away in my room.

This is an illustration of Espen Øverdahl as Too Much Coffee Man. Why would I do something like that? Probably because I was bored shitless. The idea came to me originally from a post on My Opera where Espen was shown offering free coffee. He’s made himself a reputation of being a heavy coffee drinker, so he’s like a real-life Too Much Coffee Man. I wanted something to illustrate, and well this idea seemed better than the previous ideas I had. I did this illustration in American movie poster dimensions, exactly 27×40 inches. Viewing the largest image size on Flickr by clicking the image above would yield an image only 25% of the original image’s size. I like to work big. The image is painted as an oil painting typically would be without the mess and cost in Corel Painter X.

When viewing photos of Espen on his own My Opera log this might not appear to look a lot like him, and it doesn’t. I doubt Espen is able to make his eyes bulge like that, but he’s had about his 1000th cup of coffee, so they should be falling out of his head by now. I just wonder what his response will be if he catches a glimpse of this.