Firstly, no, this is not a self portrait. It is a portrait of the legendary rapper Eminem, whom I have listened to for a long time. There are a number of reasons I like his work, but one of those is his utterly insane talent of enunciating clearly while maintaining intensely fast lyrics. There is no better example of this than his track titled “Rap God,” which is why I decided to create his portrait with every word of the rap, all 1,560 of them, in order. Do bear in mind that some of the content of the rap might be offensive to some viewers, so if you are easily offended, don’t look too close!

This piece presented a number of challenges that I had not really experienced with my normal style of work. Primarily, hand fatigue. Writing all the words while being sure to keep hands off the paper was.. well let’s say this one took a little longer than I expected. About 1/2 way through I started to get a little worried that I was going to run out of paper space, but I powered through and was quite happy with the result.

I initially planned on only listening to the song while I worked, but quickly realized that would have driven me absolutely insane. I did try to accentuate some of the lines, either because I thought they were funny or cleverly used.