Next level hobbies: The art of typewriting

The British artist James Cook specialises in typewriter art. He uses different keys and symbols to create hyper-realistic celebrity portraits.

Transcript

00:00My name is James Cook, I'm 24 years old and I create drawings using typewriters.

00:23You have letters, numbers and punctuation marks and it's how you overlay that information to

00:40create those visuals and it's really it's a case of taking one step back and you see the image but

00:45when you take one step forward and you really look at the image up close you've really sort

00:49of appreciate and sort of notice all those tiny letters and numbers and punctuation marks that go

00:54into making a drawing. If I'm drawing someone's portrait I always start with the eyes because

01:02they're the hardest facial feature to get right basically. I always use like the bracket symbols

01:07to do the pupils and then like a little zero in the middle to capture like the white of someone's

01:11eye and then if I'm drawing buildings I don't know I'll use underscores, forward slashes to do the

01:18roof pitches of buildings. I just use basically what's available, the 44 keys of a typewriter.

01:24This drawing here if you look really closely you can see I've used like the forward slash to just

01:32finish the curve of this guy's head here but you know like the glasses I use the commas and then

01:38I don't know if you can see but really closely I've used the brackets to draw, well type in the eyes.

01:48Famous celebrities I've done a portrait of Blake Shelton, I've done Tom Hanks, Jeff Goldblum,

01:59lots of cast members from like famous British TV programs like Doctor Who and some of my

02:05favourite cult films I like such as Napoleon Dynamite and I've been very lucky to post some

02:11of that work to them which has been brilliant and I suppose one of the goals is to take some

02:25typewriters abroad and like I've got lots of typewriters from different countries and they

02:30all have they have their own language on the so it'd be cool to like take a typewriter to that

02:35country with that language and then do a drawing there as well so that it kind of like the two

02:41of us.