Been going through some injury rehab which has kept me from doing much physical activity. Thought it’d be the perfect time to watch The Wire since I’d heard so many awesome things about it.

And now I know why everyone I knew who’d seen it loved it…

Holy crap that show was amazing! I wish I could forget it all so I could rewatch it all again with the unknowning excitement of a first-viewing! The writing on that show was just brilliant. SO glad I finally watched it! Naturally, I had to do some sort of Wire-inspired drawing!

I also thought this would be a fun opportunity to revisit the style of the All Star Vinyl figures (from Upper Deck) that I enjoy so much. It reminded me of an exercise I did at art school — take a character from something that seems like it shouldn’t have a toy figure tie-in and give it the toy figure concept treatment.

Omar was the first person that popped into my head that I wanted to draw. The Omar-moment that stuck with me most from the first season was [MINOR SPOILER ALERT] that scene where he’s walking through the projects in broad daylight with his sawed-off shotgun strapped to his side while everyone was running away yellin’ “Omar comin’! Omar comin’!”

I took some screen caps of that scene so I’d have some reference as to what he was wearing. Then I approached the drawing like I was designing an All Star Vinyl Omar Little figure. I put the figure in a standing pose with accessories — sawed-off shotgun strapped to his side, the bulletproof vest, the cigarette, the stash from his latest stick-up of a Barksdale stash house.

After finishing the figure, I went about designing what I think the box-art would be. I used a picture of the streets of Baltimore from the The Wire website. Also used an HBO logo from their site. I couldn’t find a good hi-res logo of The Wire, so I drew one in Illustrator so I’d have a nice clean vector logo to use. Lastly, I felt like there should be a quote from Omar. A lot of fan art I saw used the well-known, “If you come at the King, you best not miss” line, so I wanted to use something else. Decided to use the line Omar delivers at the end of season one when he returns to Baltimore and he sticks up some dealers in the street. Thought it was a very appropriate quote for this piece.

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[11″x14″] Col-Erase Pencil -> Micron Pens -> Photoshop & Illustrator -> InDesign