100% cotton but not a t-shirt

I recently saw a drawing of a one dollar bill and liked the idea so much I decided to try my hand at it. Pun intended. The one I saw is incredible compared to the one I did, but in my defense, I haven’t put a pencil to a piece of paper for a real long time. So thanks @vaansteem, though you haven’t the slightest clue, you talked me into practicing. I put a pencil in my hand for my introduce yourself post a couple months ago, other than that, it’s been a couple decades since I’ve drawn anything.

It turned out to be more fun than I originally expected and after about 2n1/2 hours I was able to set the pencils down. After a rough outline, I had to do the majority of the shading and do it rather quickly because the shadow kept changing as the sun traveled by the window. (an electric light will maintain a steady shadow for desired time - noted!) I used a mechanical pencil, 3 colored pencils, one piece of paper and an insufficient eraser. (get some erasers - noted!) Here’s what I came up with:

(I’ll keep an eye out for a top-shelf, bad mamma-jamma set of colored pencils, the ink those people use in Washington is fancy!)

By the time I had a piece of paper and some pencils sitting on a TV tray in front of me, I needed a Federal Reserve Note. So I grabbed a piece of cotton paper with the number 20 on it out of the top drawer, you know what top drawer I’m talking about, set it down, and took a picture:

(Model: Andrew Jackson - 7th US President; Well known for his role in the Indian Removal Act of 1830 also known as the “Trail Of Tears:”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears
Special shout-out to US Bureau of Engraving and Printing for their outstanding printing services:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Engraving_and_Printing
Also a special thanks to Crane & Company. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crane_Currency Without the assistance from you guys, the Bureau wouldn’t have anywhere to slap their ink. There’s no 👁 in team!
http://web.mit.edu/dryfoo/Masons/Essays/eyepyr.html )

Now that you’ve seen the before and after, let’s complete the series with a couple shots taken in the middle:

(Scroll back up to see the cover image and the slideshow is complete. Hope you enjoyed it!)

That’s the end of the slide show and commentary but let’s talk about those above images real quick before I sign off. We can agree the image on the right is a drawing and the image on the left is a Federal Reserve Note, correct? They’re the same consistency, cotton as each other. Same consistency as an envelope, a newspaper, deposit slip and even the same consistency as that bag your to-go order of food is in.

We all agreed, simply by being born, and still choose to believe, the image on the left holds “value.” I could change the number 20 on the image on the right to a 5 or a 1 or 3 or 27 and we would all uniformly agree it’s just as worthless as it was with the 20 on it. But if I changed the 20 on the image on the left, to anything, we would all agree I’m a criminal. Why? Because we We The People, as a group, choose to believe the laws created to protect the currency (money, dough, paper, cash, spread, coin, etc). After all, the people who invented the currency also invented the laws.

Welcome to 2018! Where a 3D sketch of our adopted currency fits securely in one of these:
BTC - 1PVvtKaPpGuCbSJNt7YqcycWJb9aiPgAdU