For our 50th anniversary, we handed the plant to the artists making its most striking images and got out of the way. It started with a family portrait that took 144 hours to draw. Check out all of the art and pictures from our 50th Anniversary print mag below. Light up, scroll and enjoy.
This content originally appeared in High Times’ 50th Anniversary print issue. Get yours here.
It took Liam Wesley Goodman 144 hours to draw the family portrait.
Sixteen days, thirty-six faces, some rendered as small as a single square inch, every one in colored pencil. For the 50th anniversary issue, High Times asked Goodman to put fifty years of cannabis culture into a single image: the founders, editors, writers, activists, musicians and icons who built this magazine and the movement around it.
“Very little room for error,” he says of working that small. “As the drawing progresses, the odds of making a mistake increase.” Some of his reference photos dated back to the late ’70s, tiny and low-resolution, extremely difficult to see in detail. He wanted to do each person justice. If there had been no deadline, he says, he would have aimed for fifty faces, or even a hundred.
Goodman has spent eight years and more than nine thousand hours drawing this plant. He came to it in 2017, when a vapor lounge in Toronto asked him for “weed art” and he was surprised to find how little realistic cannabis-flower work existed. It clicked that he could carve out that path. His first vision was a space filled with four hundred and twenty hand-drawn flowers, each showing off the diversity the plant is capable of.
“They can outlaw the plant but they can’t outlaw the art.”
Liam Wesley Goodman
He was on fire. It became an obsession with …
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
