Understand Blue: VIDEO: Pop Art Lion (LeRoy Neiman Inspired)

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The 90s have come up quite a bit lately. Nostalgia? On one of my favorite podcasts, The Prosecutors, one of the hosts had no idea that pagers were a legitimate work tool. He is so young, he thought they were just for drug dealers! 😆

I worked in the construction industry so pagers were essential in the pre-cell phone era. I remember vividly switching from pagers to Nextel phone/radio combos and it felt so fancy.

There's been a lot of 90s music chatter too. I'm more of a pre-90s music person - 60s-80s - but there's a lot of love out there for the 90s, musically.

So I thought I'd use that to inspire a card this week, and I went back to something that was ALL the rage in the early 90s, and that was the art of LeRoy Neiman. His portrait of Sylvester Stallone was the one I always think of when I think of him - his art was in several of the Rocky movies, and Rocky will always be a movie I vividly remember the actual experience of seeing for the first time.

It's a fun pop art style, made up of sort of impressionist influences but with bright, bright colors and bold strokes.

It's also very relevant now, as the craft industry is being endangered by counterfeit product dumped into the market, and LeRoy Neiman is one of the most ripped off contemporary artists around - there's a nod to that in the article above. He was the canary in the coal mine of stolen art. So check out some of his original, beautiful artwork here.

And be inspired by his STYLE to create something with stamps, like this stunning lion stamp.

I stamped the lion in black ink, and the only other ink I used was Pool Party. I used my favorite masking paper and OLO Markers.