One in a Billion

After my trip to Beijing China last year, I got many inspirations and new ideas for my painting:
China is a huge country both in term of size and population. Before I travel to Beijing, I have no concept of over a billion population was like and Beijing has almost 25 million compare to the 33 million of the country of Canada where I live. When I was there when during the October national holiday when close to a million Chinese different parts of China travel to Beijing, the capital city. I saw many faces among the thousands even talked a few at all the tourist spots. Once I took a look of them, then they move along replaced with another. I likely will never see them again in my life time. I have no idea of who they are what they do for a living but they all seem happy and enjoying themselves. They are just one in a billion which gave me the idea to work on this new series of portraits “one in a billion”
I work on them in between my regular paintings, mostly done in an hour or less with little drawing but direct brushwork. I had been doing one per day, they are very enjoyable to do and as soon as I post them on my flickr page I would get comments on them almost right away.
This one I called it the little emperor because of china’s one child policy, parents are so devoted to please their child some are very spoil. They are the modern day emperors of China. This child was wearing an imperial hat, one time the color of yellow was the emperor’s color and only the emperor allowed to wear. In Forbidden City, they have those hats for sale and parents would buy them for their child to wear.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alfredng/sets/72157629102218995/