Everyone You Know Looks Like This When They’re High

Ben Evans spent his formative years in smoke-filled rooms with people who were absolutely going nowhere that evening, and he drew all of them. Working under the name Ben is Right, he’s built an illustration practice around the particular textures of getting stoned with other people—the post-smoke munchies demolition of a bag of chips, the horizontal sprawl across someone’s couch, the specific quality of attention that weed gives to mundane things.

The illustrations are bright and flat and slightly deranged in the way that good stoner art often is—they don’t romanticize, exactly, but they don’t moralize either. There are latex lesbians sharing a joint. There are hairy men in nothing but their enthusiasm. There are people eating things they will regret. There’s the whole inventory of late-night impulses rendered in poster colors, and it has the visual logic of a world where nothing is embarrassing because everyone is equally compromised.

What makes it work is the specificity. Evans isn’t drawing a generic idea of weed culture—he’s drawing people he knows in situations that actually happened, which gives even the most cartoonish images a quality of honest documentation. Some of these people are definitely naked and covered in ketchup. Some of them are definitely using the weed to have more interesting sex than the rest of us. All of them feel real.

His full catalog is at benisright.com, where you can spend a pleasant half hour recognizing your friends in the faces of strangers.