'Baked'

I recently did this illo for the LA Times for a review of 'Baked' by Mark Haskell Smith. The book is about cannabis, a special kind of cannabis called 'Elephant Crush' and gangsters. Hence the gun, the cannabis leaf and the elephants in suits. (Wow I am clever.) For a more thorough review head over to the LA Times.

It made me think as to whether this was really the first time I had drawn a cannabis leaf. Surely I must have drawn one with tippex on my school bag as a 14 year old boy? Or if I told the 14 year old version of myself that in the future - you / I would get paid money to draw a cannabis leaf coming out of a gun would I believe the future me? Would I be impressed? Should I be impressed? I suppose I'm having these thoughts as it is a ridiculous thing to draw. Isn't it?

All I know is that the 10 year old me would probably be slightly impressed with the gun at least. Though perhaps would recognise that it's not even a proper hand gun but an air pistol. Not that I was obsessed with guns as a child but when my brother and I first joined the library next to Safeways in cheltenham the first books we got out were two giant books about guns that contained hundreds of pictures of guns. We then took these books home where our mum was hugely unimpressed with our dad for allowing us said books while we snuck off and carefully reproduced these guns in pencil in our sketchpads. I think I cockily started to copy a large, meticulously detailed photo of the insides of a hand gun and then subsequently gave up when I realised I hadn't left enough space for the trigger or something. So in actual fact I think Rich and I were only obsessed with guns for a weekend at the most and probably went back to copying super heroes from Marvel comics. My mum was even less impressed when she had to take the mostly unread books back to the library where she was greeted with substantial late fines.