Three years ago, owvBICS aka Charles Shedden started recycling scraps from his brother’s wood shop in Brooklyn and taking the house paint his neighbors seemed to be constantly throwing away. Giving a new layer to mass production, he sat down and made 4437 character paintings from these recyclables. Like a one-person assembly line, he paints 20 to 30 at a time.
“First I paint a layer on each panel, usually the head and the shirt, then I go back and add two to five more layers—eyes, mouth, jewelry, etcetera—until each piece seems done. Im not looking for a specific ending, I don’t care if they all look good, formed well, colors matched. I like to keep a random element involved. The ones that I dislike the most, always wind up being someone else’s favorite, and I like to keep it like that.”
These days, he paints his characters on comic storage boards cut into trading cards, which he says he makes thousands of in one sitting, gives away to friends and leaves on the street for passersby to take for free.
Find more from Charles Shedden on owvbics.com.
