James Cook, at the age of 23 years old, is now one of the world’s premier typewriter artists, and based on his works, he totally deserves the title. The young architecture student got into typewriter art about five years ago, after reading about another famous typewriter artist, Paul Smith, who couldn’t use a pencil or paintbrush to do drawings, because of his severe cerebral palsy.
Inspired by the story and intrigued about typewriter art, so he decided to give it a try. It was love at first sight, after bought his first typewriter from an antique shop, James started using it to create illustrations and portraits.
“I started about five years ago, I was at college at the time and I was making art,” James said.
“Just through my research, I came across this guy by the name of Paul Smith, who had cerebral palsy. And unfortunately, because of his condition, he couldn’t use a pencil or paintbrush to do drawings. But he actually started to use typewriters, and he ended up producing these amazing portraits and drawings. So I was really inspired by his story, and I started about five years ago and I haven’t stopped since,” he added.
When James finally bought his first typewriter, he then started to collect them, and now he has about 20 of them for his collection. All of the typewriters aren’t really a good choice to be writing instruments anymore, but being used as an artistic medium. He only has two colors at his disposal which are black and red.
Can be seen on his Instagram’s account, he made detailed portraits of celebrities and iconic film characters, to the intricate landscape. This shows nothing that James Cook can’t draw with his typewriter.
James said, “It’s quite labor intensive but I enjoy it. It’s using an obsolete piece of technology to create something nice,”.
“I usually start in the middle of the paper and work my way out. I use specific characters and letters to do certain jobs. For example, full stops, underscores and forward slashes are good for straight lines, and brackets, Os and zeros good for curves. The @ symbol is ideal for shading. But I also build them all up, two or three characters on top of each other, to create the depth,” he added.
Charging between $130 (RM540) and $200 (RM830) per artwork also depends on its complexity to make one. Claimed that most of his artworks are done freehand. His right had used to type the characters and the left one to move the line space knob.
Source: Oddity Central