I just came back from one of Dru Blair's airbrush workshops in North Carolina and had the chance to see th original painting in person. It's not very large (a little bit larger than 18"x24" perhaps) and it's painted on illustration board. I remember the illustration board was slightly warped from the amount of paint on it. The "Portrait of Tica" was the first thing I saw when I walked into his classroom even though it was kept in a corner of the room, unframed, held up only by pushpins. At first I believed the portrait could not be a real painting, but it was. I could see the telltale marks of slight airbrush spatter in the detailing of the dress and the characteristic softness of the freehand airbrush line in the rendering of the model's hair. During one his lectures about color theory and the possibilities of the airbrush he showed the students yet another nearly unbelievable example of what could be accomplished. On the walls of his classroom he had what appeared to be two pieces of regular white notebook paper taped to the wall with a pencil drawing of a stick figure on each of them. The only difference between the two was that one was real and the other was painted with an airbrush. It was very hard to tell the difference between the two from as little as a foot away. Almost every student in the class kept walking up to the painted "fake" piece of paper and touching it because every detail on it was so exact from the blue lines of the ruled notebook paper to the look of the graphite stick figure that was supposed to be drawn on it. All the while, Mr. Blair was cracking jokes, giving demonstrations, and acting like it was no big deal at all. His catchphrase throughout the entire time I was there was "It's so damn easy", which was said as a way of encouraging his students. But the truth was he was obviously a master at what he was doing.