Persons Of Note: Getting to know Ali

I didnt really know much at all about Muhammad Ali apart from the fact he was a famous boxer. I dedicated my time to watching some of his more famous fights (vs sonny liston, rumble in the jungle, thrilla in manila) on youtube and reading up about his life. 

What I discovered is that Ali was quite a strongly motivated individual so I dedicated a whole page to quotes as he had so many good ones, I knew I would want to include them later. 

When watching his fights on youtube, I took note of key moments of the fight as well as his fighting style.  I worked in pencil for this, trying to use thumbnails to keep small scenes in snippets. The pencil helped me quickly jot down key elements of the fight. 

I also looked into his life outside of boxing, He was a reasonably well dressed person so I practiced with some ink shading his outfits. I was quite pleased with the checkered suit in ink. A lot of my work for this is in black and white. 

This is for two key reasons, the first being that when Muhammad Ali was first getting famous, all of his fights were aired in black and white as very few people had colour tvs. 

The second reason I decided to work a lot in black and white is because of Ali's personal attitude, he was a man that saw black and white/win or lose. There was no grey area for him so I tried to bring across that attitude through colour as much as I could. 

I looked into all of the awards that he had won over his lifetime, some of them for boxing and others for peace keeping. Muhammad Ali also famous for converting to Islam in a time when it wasn't really the done thing. His original name is Cassius Clay but he refers to it as his slave name, I think that after I read about his background I got a much stronger feel for the character than before. 

The crit for this was quite helpful, It helped me think outside the box. Rather than just going for boxing I looked into his outside life and I think if I hadn't done that I wouldn't have got the sense for who he was. The time period really did inform my work as did Ali's personal life.