The latest bit of brilliance from the Cleveland Plain Dealer: This striking portrait of perpetually angry actor Charlie Sheen. It ran afront Saturday’s features section.
Click for a much larger view:
The illustration — made of matches — was built by Chris Morris. Marvin Fong photographed the result. The page was designed by Amanda Petkiewicz.
Chris tells us:
Early in the week I was asked if I had a Charlie Sheen caricature available, or willing to do one, for Saturday’s Arts&Life cover. I have drawn him twice before but what we needed here felt different. Last Sunday, the New York Times did a big blowout portrait. I didn’t want to follow that with another big drawing or caricature.
But the idea to ‘draw’ him with matches came to me and I thought why not give it a try? Seemed to fit his incendiary personality. So Wednesday morning I pitched the idea to our team, then left the office to go buy boxes of matches and a board to glue them to, and started it after lunch Wednesday afternoon. In total it took about 4 hours and 900 matches.
Brought it to work Thursday, asked for permission (and an extinguisher from Building Services) and we lit it at the entry of our parking garage, somewhat out of the breeze. Three photographers and a video camera running for the whole burn.
A Plain Dealer security guy blasted it with the extinguisher after we got what we needed.
Average daily circulation for the Plain Dealer is 246,571.
Find the Plain Dealer‘s visuals blog here.
