Brandon Warren learned to draw at his father’s knee.

As a boy, he sat with his dad, Steve, in the evenings and played drawing games. The two created drawings to see if the other could guess what each had drawn.

Now, he and his 10-year-old son, Braden, do the same: sit together and draw. Braden looks at his dad’s drawings and asks how he drew something or made it a certain way. They share tips and enjoy time together. Braden wants to do caricature events with his dad, so Brandon is helping him use his lines in drawing more efficiently. The duo participates in drawing contests at the local library. They also hand-draw and mail postcards to family and friends.

“I’m blessed to do my favorite hobby and let the art be a blessing to others,” Brandon says.

His hobby shifted this past year from creating art for himself and friends to producing custom T-shirts and paintings, an indoor mural, and menu boards for several locations of the barbecue restaurant chain Sugarfire.

“I’m just thankful for them taking a chance on a local, unproven artist,” he says. “Sugarfire opened a lot of doors of exposure for my artwork.”

 

After the Sugarfire job, Upper Deck—which has exclusive rights to produce Marvel trading cards—contacted Brandon to contribute work on artist sketch cards. He’s since done three sets of Fleer Ultra X-Men and Marvel Masterpieces. Ironically, he collected cards from those sets as a child.

More work followed when Brandon customized Parkland Health Mart Pharmacy with his paintings, followed by art for High Rollerand Bigfoot monster trucks, including holiday shirts. He has created a coloring book for the city of Farmington and also published artwork in a comic book with his fan art interpretation of the characters.

“A lot of doors just open to me from one project to the next,” he says.

Brandon, who grew up in Park Hills, lives in Farmington with wife Melanie and sonBraden. His passion is his inspiration, creating art from everyday things—a movie he saw, a funny story, even someone’s interesting personality.

“You pour so much of yourself into each piece you make that they become a distant part of you,” he says. “You always hope they are well loved and appreciated wherever they go.”

View Brandon Warren’s work on Facebook: Original Art by Brandon Warren and on Instagram @bwarrenart.