The photograph depicts my grandfather racing bikes in San Antonio, Texas in 1917, 100 years ago. He was 19 years old. My aunt gave me this photograph (it was hidden away in a shoe box) shortly after he passed away.
I was inspired to take the image and create a large paint by numbers canvas to commemorate my grandfather, decorate the shop, and launch an iconic image for the brand. The photograph didn’t have enough detail to get an adequate posterized version from Photoshop so an illustrator/painter friend, Mark Sasway (Instagram @sasway_illustration), manually created a “digitized” version from the photograph, which is about 3×2 inches, in four colors. We projected it onto a 12×12 foot canvas, a painters drop-cloth (you can see the seam running horizontally through the middle of the canvas), with some very old school projector technology, traced the lines and painted in the areas according to their number.
