“Tony Rodriguez goes beyond likeness to capture the essence of the rap iconoclast, and the image buzzes with kinetic swagger.” —Cecilia Yung

“At a closer glance, what grabbed me was how Tony’s Andre 3000 piece was retro but modern, psychedelic and a bit otherworldly. His color sensibility is restricted yet vibrant.” —Veronica Padilla

Comments by Tony Rodriguez:

How long have you been working in illustration, and how long have you been teaching at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU)? I’ve been working as an editorial illustrator for a little more than a decade. My career picked up rather quickly after I signed with the Sullivan Moore Artist Agency, and I owe quite a bit to my agent Katherine Moore for helping me to jump-start my career. I also have been at MTSU since 2019—still relatively new to the art department here.

Tell us about the context for your portrait of Andre 3000. What inspired you to pick him as the subject for the piece? I chose Andre for a sketch demo, and I chose him rather randomly. I like his look, his lips, his demeanor and his fashion sense, among other things. He’s an interesting character. I’ve drawn him a couple of times in the past, but I always enjoy sketching him for the aforementioned reasons.

I particularly love the malachite-like background in this piece. How did you accomplish that in the painting? For the inspiration of the background, I had a professor named Rubin Salinas who [imparted] a drawing warm-up technique that prepares you for the eventual production of straightline drawing. To summarize, I doodle a circle freehand without any concern for accuracy. After it’s complete, I doodle another circle within that circle while following the first circle’s path as closely as possible while attempting to prevent my second circle from touching the first. A strange, funkadelic pattern manifests as you continue with this method until the page is full. The technique was never meant to have visual appeal, but I always liked the look of the end result. Its only function was to warm up your hand so that you could pursue straight-line drawing more effectively—and it works!

What medium did you choose to make the piece and why? I used Photoshop CC for this piece because the class I was creating this demonstration for was a digital illustration course. We were exploring preliminary work for final editorial projects, this piece being an example of how to cultivate a tight sketch for a potential client. I liked the rough enough to bring this to a full finish, which I pursued later in the week and finalized over that weekend.

Besides personal work, what kinds of projects do you enjoy doing? I love making horror movies with my wife Amanda! So far, we’ve made five short horror films, and they’re a total blast. They’re bad, but our family and friends seem to enjoy them. We also recently started a band called T.V. Queen. Amanda plays bass, I play drums and our toddler cuts a rug as we run through our setlist.

How would you describe what distinguishes your approach to illustration? I believe that I sit within a large style-family of digital artists that exist these days, and we all vibe off of each other. Many of us approach nearly identical subject matter as well. I suppose it’s not quite caricature, but it doesn’t sit on the realism fence either; it often sits between those two worlds, and perhaps that’s why it sticks out from time to time. If I pause for a moment or two prior to assigning or inserting a certain kind of illustration into a category, it often means that the work at hand isn’t blatantly one thing or another, and that intrigues me. An old mentor once told me that an illustration should make you pause for a moment, and then make you pause several more times after that.

Caricature illustration is like jazz music in that it’s blatantly one thing and not another. As soon as I hear jazz, I make the connection that it’s jazz very quickly and then move on. But the music that possesses and introduces all kinds of genre-infused sounds with perhaps some hints of jazz—that tends to hold my attention longer as it’s not so straightforward. It’s not blatantly one thing or another; there’s cause for pause. Hopefully that’s what some folks get out of my portraits, and perhaps that’s part of what helps distinguish my faces from others’.