When I was a young lad dreaming about owning my own traffic light, I tended to draw them. Sometimes they were part of an overall scene, but more than that, they were just the light by itself. Despite my father being an art teacher, I never really did get very good at drawing. This isn’t the case with Sean Gallo.

“STOP!” A picture by Sean Gallo, at SeanGallo.com

While surfing the web for signal images (yea, I do that) I came across one of his great pieces of art on his website SeanGallo.com. It appeared to be an impressionistic oil or water color painting of a signal, but created in Photoshop. I contacted Sean to find out the back story of this piece and his style of his artwork.

“Stop!” as he calls this particular piece was a commission from a DJ/Entertainer friend who was writing a blog.

“He calls on me fairly regularly to create drawings for his blog posts, and in this case he wanted to write a blog about marketing… specifically, how to drive traffic to your blog.”

And like many of us who grew up watching Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, the signal in the living room left an impression on Sean as well. As an artist, he doesn’t have a set schedule.

“I’ll work in fits, which can last for hours without coming up for air, or just a few minutes before I get frustrated and walk away… so it’s always difficult to look back and recount just how long any particular drawing took to create.  In this case, I think it would be fair to say I spent an hour or two doodling various ideas, and then put in another 3 or 4 hours on the actual piece.  And per my usual M.O., I’m sure I came back and touched it up a few times before I finally pulled the trigger and shared it with my friend.”

Well done, Sean. Let me know when t-shirts are available. I’ll take an XL on dark grey.