“What I do every day is get a pencil, take a piece of paper, and draw,” Wes Noyes said.
The 17-year-old artist hopes someday to work in animation or as a graphic artist. Wes works for more than an hour a day, takes classes, and to date has made more than 500 pencil drawings.
After Wes playfully collaborated on a chalk drawing made by his mother Rebekah Greer, his work as a cartoonist gained national attention.
Greer, a photographer, musician, and the mother of five, had drawn fanciful backgrounds — a cityscape, an ocean scene among them — on the family’s driveway one evening this past summer and took portraits of her children posing in front of them. Wes added to the drawing she had made for son Jonah, then eight, by adding flames and interjecting himself into the picture as Godzilla.
When Greer posted the photo to Facebook, it quickly went viral.
“It sort of spread around,” Wes said, simply.
The picture, titled “Brother of the Year,” has indeed “spread around.”
It’s been viewed hundreds of thousands of times and shared on multiple blogs and websites. One of pages on Facebook that posted the picture has about 25,000 “Likes” to date and was shared 2,000 times.
The picture was posted on the front page of Reddit.
It was voted a “Top Pic” on “Taste of Awesome” and given the caption, “Chalk Just Got a Little More Epic.”
“When I hear the word ‘epic,’ I think ‘big,’” Wes said, “like natural disasters and things that affect many people worldwide.”
He said that he liked that the word “epic” was used in association with “Brother of the Year.”
“Epic. That word can be pretty overused, cliché. It’s like small talk,” Wes said. “People say things like ‘What an epic fail!’ when there’s nothing epic going on. But Godzilla verses Jonah the Superhero is kind of epic.
"Maybe it’s epic to think about using strength to save others. Maybe that’s really epic.”
Greer said her children’s artistic expressions are “like a window into their souls.”
“It’s my goal to ground them in Truth," Greer said, "so that they are always aware of who the original Creator is."
See more of Wes Noyes’ work at HERE.
Jennifer Grant is the author of two books, Love You More: The Divine Surprise of Adopting My Daughter andMOMumental: Adventures in the Messy Art of Raising a Family. Find her online at jennifergrant.com or follow her on Twitter @JenniferCGrant.
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