The sketch we found was this one, entitled Olimpio Fusco. Done in  the period between 1900 and 1910, it is a charcoal drawing laid Michallet paper. (For more on this work, visit the wonderful gallery of the Corcoran Museum at www.corcoran.org.) The face was youthful and confident, almost arrogant. The mussed up hair gave the young man a strange look, like he had just woken up and gotten out of bed.  Of course, we wouldn't use an image that we didn't own or hold a copyright to. We made this image's concept serve as an inspiration to our own, original work.

We started to sketch, (in fact, sketched way too many studies,) finalizing a look that we wanted. Fortunately, (or unfortunately,) our Castrato was not arrogant at all, but a little bewildered. His features are softer, almost feminine without sacrificing the masculine traits. With the final sketch,  we now had a more concrete idea and began our digital manipulation.

Using the GIMP, we gave it a sepia tone. Since it was already decided before hand what colors would pre-dominate the text,  ( a really dark maroon) we followed the theme and went from sepia to the same maroon of the text.  But we still didn't have the Warhol effect we wanted. So we 'colorized' it by picking up the daker tones and making the lighter tones disappear.  We gave it a beige background to complement the dark maroon font. After a little tweaking, (color wise), we were finally happy with the result. >>>

    We also decided the original font was too 'skinny' and used a more taditional font.  So there you have it.  A few years ago, it would have had to go through an entire process that would have taken a lot of man hours.   With today's technology, all the artwork was done on the computer. No more color separation or the other offset stuff we would have to deal with.