Screen Printed Kobe Bryant Illustration
MJ was the GOAT and Kobe was the Black Mamba! It was time to finally do a Kobe tribute illustration. Now, I'm honestly not a Kobe fan or the Lakers for that matter. I love the Nuggets, that's my squad and when the Lakers took them out in the 2009 Wester Conference Finals, it broke my heart and cemented my hate for that team and Kobe. But even though I was not a fan, I could not deny that Kobe was the man, and in my opinion, second only to MJ when it comes to the "GOAT" conversation (I know there is Bill Russel, Kareem, Wilt, but I didn't watch those cats play so by default, not on my list). I also thought it was a good follow up to the MJ poster I had already created.
Once again I decide to use Fresco. I needed that perfect pic, of a young Mamba, with the afro (Todd Warshaw/Getty Images). I wanted to stick with the complementary color theme and went with the obvious, yellow and purple. Once again, a teachable moment and I still need to show my students I still have skills to pay them bills. Once I finished the illustration in Fresco I took it to Illustrator to clean up and prep the art.
I was going to screen print this one as well. I planned from the beginning so it was a much easier pre layers and colors to print in Fresco. It would be a 6 color print this time, one less than Jordan. The paper was 100 lb cover stock from French Paper Co. I used Speedball Acrylic Screen Printing Inks. There were a few mistakes in prepping screens, mixing inks (the first purple I made was terrible, bad inks), and printing so many layers, but lots of lessons learned.
I am selling 7 prints of my Kobe Illustration!
If you enjoy my work and are interested in purchasing one of the posters for $100, please shoot me an email (jamgonzo@gmail.com) and we can connect.
Enjoy!
