These Drawings Feature Death Orgies and Pizza Snakes

This article contains adult content. 

Oakland-based artist and illustrator Cahill Wessel spends up to 200 hours working on his colored pencil drawings, but the breathtakingly bold colors he achieves are well worth the exhaustive effort. "Working with colored pencil is insanely time consuming, so I invest much of my time in planning a piece to ensure I don’t waste time creating a piece that isn’t worthy of human consumption,” he tells The Creators Project. "While creating these colored pencil drawings, my main goal is to seamlessly merge aspects of modern culture and timeless standards of artistic beauty through humor and wit."

The works do just that—he blends ancient styles, like the standard still life atop a fabric-covered table, but injects nods to slacker kid culture, like Nike high tops that flow from a slice of pizza, or trippy, surreal elements, like a bewigged snake, shaped, again, like a slice of pizza. (Pizza’s definitely a theme in Wessel's art.) "My colored pencil work is derived from a very calculated and methodical headspace,” he writes. "I spend countless hours sourcing images from Google, sketching out various compositions, and playing with color schemes."

Wessel also creates pen and ink drawings. They’re just as intricate and vibrant as his pencil works, but most of the similarities end there, as his ink pieces often depict graphically fantastical scenes of sex and violence. (Don’t worry, there’s still pizza.) “I never plan or sketch out my black and white drawings,” says Wessel, "and the manner in which they develop can be most easily compared to stream-of-consciousness writing… My color work occupies a space in which beauty and fun reign supreme, while I often explore raunchy, sexual, and dark themes with my pen work. Overall, these drawings allow me to create work in which the plan is not having a plan."

To learn more about Cahill Wessel's work, click here.

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