Ever wonder how movie stars get their tattoos for specific movie roles?
The Los Angeles Times featured artist and graphic designer, Dickcherry, for his work in Hollywood creating temporary tattoos for actors. He has made temporary tattoos for characters in movies like “Mama,” the action movie “The Last Stand,” “The Hangover,” and his most recent, “Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters.”
Dickcherry, 37, acquired an affinity for art as a young boy when his mother would draw characters such as G.I Joe on his brown paper lunch bags. Born in Chicago as Lee Richard Gren, Dickcherry attended the American Academy of Art in Chicago after high school. Inspired by Roy Lichtenstein paintings at the nearby Art Institute of Chicago as well as the work of Coop, Robert Williams and Kozik, and the band the Cramps, he expressed his burgeoning pop sensibility in large-scale acrylic paintings of pinups, devil girls and googly-eyed monsters.
He then moved to Los Angeles at 25 with his then girlfriend and now wife, Jill Warner, and began designing rock posters and album covers under the artist name Dickcherry.
When explaining his name change, he said: “Basically, I’m a huge ‘Batman’ fan, and I always liked the idea of having an alter ego. So basically the name Dickcherry is the alter ego I can use when I paint. My middle name is Richard, so I shortened that to Dick, and the first street I lived on was Cherry Street. It sounds taboo, and I like that.”
His career in cinema started in 2009 when a friend who worked at Tinsley Studio in Sun Valley contacted him to design tattoos for the Walt Disney Studios film “John Carter.” When the production was over, owner Christien Tinsley noticed his talent and hired him as a full-time artist and graphic designer for Tinsley Studio and a retail company that sells temporary tattoos at Halloween stores and other outlets.
“A tattoo is a really quality way to explain something about a character,” Dickcherry said. “It’s amazing how many productions require a tattoo.”
