From as young as I can remember, my parents always supported whatever it was I was drawing... the lone exception was the time I drew myself naked in a bathtub when I wanted a unique entry to the art project "Draw yourself in a room of your house." Otherwise, my parents ALWAYS supported me and made be believe I was a talented artist; which made me draw more and improve my skills as a child in an era before YouTube tutorials and hundreds of largely useless books about becoming a better artist. My parents played a huge roll in my art story.

As I talk about in this video, one of the earliest art pieces I remember drawing and getting praise for is a poster I made in 2nd grade when I was 7 or 8. My dad was, and is to this day, an electrical engineer. Part of the job involves reviewing drawings. Today, he does this on his laptop with giant external monitors that allows him to zoom in and look at the details. Back then, he had a tiny 12" screen on his laptop and no external monitors, so my dad brought drawings home to review and they would be huge sheets of paper! 30x42 or even 32x48! If there were problems, my dad would markup the drawings and take them back to the office. However, if the drawings looked good, there was no reason to lug them back on the train, so he would give them to my sister and me to draw on. I was ESTATIC when this happened because I had the opportunity to draw my own posters!

One of these posters was of the Chicago Bulls playing the Milwaukee Bucks in Chicago Stadium. I was a huge Bulls fan, but I noticed early on that I never got to see the Bulls play the Bucks. I assume the proximity of the cities meant that the teams would usually play during the day when I was in school and it was never a primetime affair; but as a kid, this made me super curious about the Bucks. I don't even know if I knew what color their jerseys were - based on the drawing itself, I did not. Anyway, when my dad saw this, he was CRAZY impressed. You can see this in the video above. When 8 year old Kevin wants to talk about my MC Hammer poster, I have to beg my dad to stop looking at the Bulls poster. And after my dad stops recording, he obviously asked me to "Talk about the Bulls poster some more."

I'm pretty sure my sister destroyed that Bulls poster at some point either to instigate me to get me in trouble or as revenge for something I did to her, as siblings will do to each other. However, long after my iconoclast sister destroyed it, my dad would still talk about this poster. He actually brought it up in the car on our way to a Notre Dame game last year while we were talking about my art. What impressed him the most was that I took the time to draw all the people sitting in the stadium. Really, I drew a bunch of circles without any kind of scale or depth perception whatsoever; which was normal for a kid my age without any online tutorials to turn to. Anyway, my dad's praise for the detail in the art is probably where I developed my love and appreciation for the technical detail of art and the seemingly mundane processes in art that made me a legendary MS Paint artist. It also developed my taste in art to despite random processes in modern art and love the masters of yesteryear who controlled every brush stroke to create works of beauty, appreciating that these artists spent months and years perfecting their works while modern artists don't believe in God and therefore don't believe in perfection and can be done in a couple of hours (if that).

So, when I decided to draw my dad's portrait for Christmas, it was quickly apparent what I needed to do. My dad is a huge Notre Dame fan (and he gave that love for the school to me). Since 2008, my dad and I have gone to multiple games every year (except that COVID year) and have cherished every minute of it. For this Christmas present, I would draw my dad and myself together at a Notre Dame game. If you look closely at the detail, it's in the immediate aftermath of the 2022 Notre Dame v. Clemson game, where unranked Notre Dame had just upset #1 ranked Clemson. However, I think the photo I used as a reference for the two of us was from another night game (perhaps the 2023 USC game). The stadium references were from the Clemson, 2024 Florida State, and USC games.

Low key, what I love about this is that my approach to drawing people in a crowd of people has actually gotten more simple since I was a kid. Back then, I drew a couple hundred circles in an area. Today, I make a very tiny swipe of my marker of various colors to get across the point that people are wearing different color clothes with a lot of blues, golds, and greens. However, what I didn't have the patience for as a kid was the 20 hours it took to draw the stadium and all these small marker strokes in patterns that showed people making their way to the field or the exits via the stairs between sections. Drawing the flow of traffic in the stadium lends so much credibility to the illusion of detail that it's shocking! I wish I could go back in time and show 8-year-old Kevin this after he finished his Chicago Bulls poster after spending 4 hours drawing circles and be like, "Dude, little man, look how good you're going to get!"

I think the only person who might love this piece more than my dad would be 8-year-old Kevin if he could see it.