Matthew Cooney's FMP: Will Prince

Will Prince is a 22 year old English artist from Carlisle. He has gained attention mainly in the Hip Hop community for his portraits of rappers and singers. He first gained attention when he was only 17, when Kid Cudi used his drawing of him as his MySpace profile picture. He then designed single or mixtape covers for Diggy Simmons, Cheef Keef and Joey Fatts. More recently his more professional and refined style has been used for mixtape covers for established rappers Action Bronson, Asher Roth, Alex Wiley and Lucki Eck$.

His style is very unique and has become very popular. He picks out a photo of an artist and sketches them free hand with markers and highlighters, often sharpie pens. He then scans in the drawing and a adds colour using illustrator. He says he doesn't actually know much about illustrator apart from adding colour, but the fact that he hand draws the image first separates him from other people that do illustrated portraits. The photo he picks is very important to him. He doesn't just pick out any photo but finds one that displays the right emotion or ambience. This task can actually take longer than the sketch. The style of the sketch is very messy with lots of scribbly rushed strokes. The lines are very bold and square, similar to pop art which is an influence of his. He also adds the detail and texture using the marker lines and the colour fill goes as a background layer. The colour fills are all solid-there is no gradient. However the density and weight of the black marks over top add a third dimension to the drawing and make areas darker than others.