As my birthday drew nearer (a few weeks back), I was scanning my radar to find something nice to buy myself. In years past, it’s never really been an issue, as there were usually more choices than I had cash. It just became a matter of which one to buy. This year, it was weird. I had leads on a couple of different Art Adams pieces, but they didn’t pan out. And in my desperation, I even went after something on Heritage (which I normally try to avoid) and of course was outbid. No surprise there.

Just as I was about to throw in the towel, I get an email from my buddy Jonathan (to whom I had been whining about the lack of birthday art). Not sure when they cooked up their evil scheme, but apparently these two Jonathans (Mueller and Wayshak) worked together to present me with this ABSOLUTELY SPECTACULAR birthday gift. For those of you who haven’t gotten the message yet, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Jonathan Wayshak can probably draw circles around most of the people working in the industry today, PERIOD! I mean, this guy is a MAJOR (not to mention, mind-blowing) talent. What’s funny to me is that the last time I made this much noise about an artist was 30 years ago when I was going on and on about Mike Mignola (and being similarly ignored). Of course that just worked in my favor because I probably wouldn’t have the Mignola collection I have today if everyone had listened to me back then. Ha!

Anyway, I really wish you all could see this thing up close and take it all in. There’s just so much going on here that the scan can’t capture. Not even sure the technology exists to replicate all the tones, textures, and nuances that Jonathan is able to create on paper. What’s interesting to note is that when I initially got the scan from Jon (Mueller), he told me the piece was done and going to be shipped out shortly. But knowing that Jon (Wayshak) was local, I contacted him and told him to either just drop it by, or that I would be happy to come out and get it. Now I can’t pretend to know what was going on inside Jon’s mind, but I suppose he did consider the piece finished when he was all set to ship it out to me (thinking I might be in a hurry to get it). But when he realized that I wasn’t (having already seen a scan), he decided to actually go back and rework areas of the piece. The nice thing about having the BEFORE and AFTER scans is that you can pretty much see exactly what he did in terms of changes. The additional work is fairly extensive. You can compare for yourself with the BEFORE scan in the Additional Images. Now I was already completely in love with the piece before, but seeing the additional work he put into it, that just put the piece on a whole other level for me. The drawing (and Jon’s skills) are truly mind blowing.

If you would like to reach out to Jon you can contact him via his Facebook, or his website scrapbookmanifesto.com to see if he currently has room on his commission list (and yes, I am on the list, haha). Make sure you check this guy out. He’s as nice as he is talented and enjoys meeting new people. He’s a very humble guy who is truly appreciative of his fans and supporters, and just a cool person to be around and chat with. He enjoys talking about the hobby and the industry, art, artists, anything really. Just a straight forward guy who doesn’t play games and calls it like he sees it. And as I’ve said, just a phenomenal illustrator with extraordinary skills.

Again, huge, HUGE, thanks to both Jonathans for giving me one of the best birthdays ever. Having friends like these in my life is truly an embarrassment of riches.

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