For our 50th anniversary, we handed the plant to the artists making its most striking images and got out of the way. It started with a family portrait that took 144 hours to draw. Check out all of the art and pictures from our 50th Anniversary print mag below. Light up, scroll and enjoy.
This content originally appeared in High Times’ 50th Anniversary print issue. Get yours here.
It took Liam Wesley Goodman 144 hours to draw the family portrait.
Sixteen days, thirty-six faces, some rendered as small as a single square inch, every one in colored pencil. For the 50th anniversary issue, High Times asked Goodman to put fifty years of cannabis culture into a single image: the founders, editors, writers, activists, musicians and icons who built this magazine and the movement around it.
“Very little room for error,” he says of working that small. “As the drawing progresses, the odds of making a mistake increase.” Some of his reference photos dated back to the late ’70s, tiny and low-resolution, extremely difficult to see in detail. He wanted to do each person justice. If there had been no deadline, he says, he would have aimed for fifty faces, or even a hundred.
Goodman has spent eight years and more than nine thousand hours drawing this plant. He came to it in 2017, when a vapor lounge in Toronto asked him for “weed art” and he was surprised to find how little realistic cannabis-flower work existed. It clicked that he could carve out that path. His first vision was a space filled with four hundred and twenty hand-drawn flowers, each showing off the diversity the plant is capable of.
“They can outlaw the plant but they can’t outlaw the art.”
Liam Wesley Goodman
He was on fire. It became an obsession with mastery, and he has been chasing the challenge since, moving from twenty-hour drawings to sixty-hour drawings to the hundred-and-fifty-hour pieces he makes now. Flowers to trichomes to hash. Detail in realism, he says, is a practice that allows for constant improvement through every drawing. Because he works mostly from reference photos, his interest is in recreating every single thing he can see, controlling which colors to select, blend and layer. “Every detail is a different colored pencil mark, every mark is intentional, every intention a purpose.”
The mural carries more than craft. Goodman calls it wild to think of being part of history within the culture, and the feeling that runs underneath the pride is loss.
“Saddened that friends who believed in me are no longer here to see this achievement. Proud to have those who still support me, strangers who believed in me early on, and purchased originals and prints to keep the vision alive.”
Liam Wesley Goodman
He hopes people notice who is missing as much as who made it in. The mural, he says, leaves out other important individuals who shaped the magazine and the culture over fifty years: photographers, artists, breeders, farmers, doctors, researchers, authors, leaders, advocates and activists who all played their part and deserve it just as much.
His one piece of advice to a young artist inspired by his work and by this magazine is the same rule he draws by. “Draw what you see.”
High Times in Vision
Goodman’s mural anchored a larger idea in the anniversary issue: that after fifty years, the most interesting thing you can still do with cannabis is look at it closely. Weed talks back through images. A flash, a frame, a swirl of ink and resin.
So we gathered a crew twisting the plant into new shapes, giving it faces, giving it stories. High, low, underground, loud. Five visions of the same plant, running from Los Angeles lifestyle shoots to European grow rooms, from Uruguayan gardens to Italian rosin labs.
Matca Films
From lifestyle shoots in Los Angeles to trichome stacking in European grow rooms, Matca’s photography explores cannabis in its many forms, always aiming to reflect the culture with authenticity and strength. Their work spans the “Art of Trichomes Science” series, hash studies like Pedro Masetti’s Hash Ball, and the classic bud-and-resin shots that made the plant worth photographing in the first place. Matca also shot this issue’s cover.
Ramiro Mordcovich & Universal Growing
Through the lens of photographer Ramiro Mordcovich, we step inside Universal Growing, a project dedicated to exploring the plant through innovation, sustainability and global connection. From vibrant flower portraits to the quiet details of cultivation, these images capture cannabis as both craft and culture, rooted in tradition yet looking toward the future. All varieties shown were cultivated by Nani and Nacho Viano for Universal Growing’s R&D department, among them Full Zest, Brrberry and BoofScotti.
Lelen Ruete
Lelen Ruete is a Latin American photographer whose work blends fashion-editorial flair with the raw beauty of cannabis. Through projects like Herbarium and Magia, and her ongoing work with The Rabbit Studio, she has become one of the world’s leading cannabis visual storytellers. Her images celebrate the plant’s colors, textures and spirit, destigmatizing cannabis while capturing its surreal, botanical elegance. The work shown here draws from her “Ladies,” “Libre” and “Magia” series, with growers including Juan Vaz and the Uruguayan clubs behind the flowers in frame.
Talking Terps
“Skipping Stoned” is illustrated by Sunflower Form, the moniker of an illustrator whose work grows from a love of nature and the radical act of expression. Using traditional methods and the visual language of underground comics, he created the piece with Talking Terps co-founder and conceptual artist HopeLord. First released in color as a print in 2020, it is reimagined here in black and white for the 50th anniversary, symbolizing the idea that what goes around comes around. Talking Terps, which appeared on the cover of the 2022 Art Issue, has since grown into a cultural force that now extends into cannabis collaborations, including with Alien Labs in California and Florida on the horizon.
TerpShotz
TerpShotz is a project created in Italy in 2017 from the union of two big passions, cannabis and photography. Through that union it tells the story of the plant, hoping to change the way people see it and help the world appreciate it with more respect and curiosity. Shot so close that hash rosin turns into terrain, the work here runs across rosin and water hash from growers and hashmakers around the world.
One Plant, Many Eyes
Different countries, different tools, one plant. What ties Goodman’s colored pencil to Ruete’s editorial eye to a hash-rosin macro shot in Italy is the same thing that has run through this magazine for half a century: the conviction that cannabis is worth looking at closely, and worth taking seriously as a subject.
Fifty years in, that is still the whole idea. Look closer.
