Hello. Here is a picture of Vladimir Putin as every member of the Village People.
It's one of hundreds of requests "Jim" (he likes to keep his real identity under the radar) has taken. He tells BuzzFeed News:
It all started because I got really, really bored and thought that a good way of being not so bored would be to draw some pictures on Paint. I was so bored, though, that I couldn't actually think of anything to draw so I asked my friends on Facebook and they asked me to draw stuff like "a frog eating a ham sandwich" and "a rubber chicken doing the Charleston" so I did. I posted my favourite ones on Tumblr and then while I was asleep I got about 150 requests from people I didn't know.
He says:
I used to do them on my lunch hour but nowadays they take about 6 hours and sometimes a lot longer if there's a lot of faces in them. Recently I've tried to do a few in under an hour so I can video the process but it's hard to go back to a simplistic style once you've got into the habit of adding as much detail as possible.
We asked Jim what his personal favourite is. He said:
That's hard. I'm usually most excited about whichever one I've just done even if it doesn't get the best response. But I also really like the earlier ones because I feel they were more surreal and challenging. It was a lot of fun trying to imagine what a guinea pig version of Burt Reynolds would look like or a turtle having a tennis lesson. The nature of the project has changed over the past 18 months and while there is definitely still an element of surrealism I think there's only so much randomness you can take before it becomes a bit tiresome. The most successful recent suggestions have been more simple; taking familiar elements of pop culture and putting unexpected twists on them.
And he says this might be the weirdest request he's ever received.
Jim says:
The weirdest requests came early on and I've forgotten/lost many of them. Probably the weirdest I ever got round to painting was this one: I love that Gemma only wanted spiders coming out of her eyes a little bit. It's restraint like that that really makes a request stand out.
And the most exciting news is – his work is now being compiled into a book.
And that, my friends, is all your Christmas presents sorted.
And what about the future? Jim says:
There are a couple of exciting collaborations in the pipeline which I'll be announcing closer to the time. Jim'll Paint It has completely taken over my life and the release of the book has meant there's a whole new audience seeing it for the first time which is really exciting. Part of the project's success is that I paint every request for free, selling prints to pay the bills. Unfortunately Facebook's recent switch to a 'pay-to-play' dynamic means that only about 16% of my followers now see my posts. It doesn't really matter though. So long as I'm still receiving requests, there will always be Jim'll Paint It.
