It's funny, because I got to meet, um, what's his name, Ralph Steadman, a few years back, who I love. He’s just one of, I’m still dining out on it, to be honest with you, years later. But what I learned from Matt is, go big; draw big bits of paper whenever you can. Get your ideas little, maybe, but go big when you're drawing.
I once did one like that; it was a 28-by-some-30-something piece of paper. It was a nice, pretty big sheet, but I kept going back to it and completed most of it. It was only on one side, mostly. It had ravens and some berries, and I don’t know, feathers, and all kinds of things. Then I grew tired of it, so I moved a few elements to the other side to balance it out. Still, there was a lot of negative space.
Then, one of my, our superintendent, he was retiring, and I found out about, you know, everybody volunteered; my team volunteered in my name. They said, "Oh, Femi, you should make an art piece for him as a going-away present." And I’m like, "What can I make? What can I make?" I hate it when people just tell me to do something, and I can't. My head sort of, everything freezes.
Then, I remembered this drawing that I had in the house. I said, "You know what, I'm going to complete this." So I got his favourite poem and wrote it. I was like, "Okay, if I make a mistake, because it's all by hand, then the whole drawing has to be trashed," because I was doing it with ink.
So, I wrote at the back, as a background, all the negative space that I had. I filled it up with that poem repeatedly, because there was a lot of space. So, it’s almost like just handwriting all the way at the back, but it's that poem. It turned out pretty cool because when I gave it to him, he was so moved. One, because the poem was one of his favourites, which I did cheat on; I asked his wife what his favourite poem was. So, I did put one of his favourite poems.
