Cap Pannell: Brandy Barham
Cap Pannell, an award-winning freelance artist in East Dallas, was sitting at his desk one day when an art director from Bethesda, Md., called to ask if he’d like to create a portrait for a U.S. Postal Service stamp.
The art director, Ethel Kessler, said she found his website and thought his work was impressive. She was looking for someone with a distinctive style to create a portrait of William Sydney Porter, who wrote short stories under the pen name “O. Henry” in the Ohio State Penitentiary after being found guilty of embezzlement. Pannell’s unique style, which combines drawing, inking and computer illustration, seemed like a perfect fit.
“I call it a combination of drawing and monoprint technique,” Pannell says. “I take a drawing and lay it down on an inked surface, and redraw it. Then that gets scanned, and sometimes it’s just a mess. You’ve got to erase blotches of ink. Then I color it in the computer.”
Pannell agreed to illustrate a portrait, and began working, sketching several test pieces for Kessler. Finally, they decided on a drawing of Porter against a backdrop of New York City, where Porter published most of his short stories. In 2009, Pannell finished his illustration, but it didn’t come out until 2012, the 150th anniversary of Porter’s birthday.
Pannell’s background is in graphic design, but he deviated from that and began doing more illustrating and painting later on in life. He started playing around with the style years ago on a portrait of his sons, and liked it. His painting even was accepted into prestigious art magazine Communication Arts.
“I figured, ‘Wow, maybe I should do this,’“he says.
Sometimes it’s hard to predict the endgame when working with ink, he says.
“But sometimes there will be a happy accident, and there will be something you weren’t expecting. And sometimes I think, ‘Well, this is a real mess. What am I going to do?’ But by and large, it always turns out.”
