The cool thing about design is that unlike everything else, it can’t be expressed in one explicit fashion. Take math and biology for example. Finding the unknown length of a triangle’s hypotenuse can only be found with the Pythagorean Theorem. In biology, there’s a certain way to make a mixture. You can’t just go all “creative” on a patient and mix random stuff – you might kill the guy. However, design is much different. It gives you the freedom to define it. Art can be defined as an intuitive website, a minimalistic business card, a great sense of interior decoration, icons, manipulation of CSS3, and in this case – dots.

Miguel Endara took the latter and made it into a true masterpiece. From there, his video on the design process went viral and has already passed 5 million views. If you haven’t seen it already, I’m not sure what’s wrong with you.

Our Interview:

Tell me how you got into drawing.

Well, I started out with the pen at the University of Miami. I used to draw a lot when I was younger, but during college I would doodle in a notebook. I would just draw random things, but somehow, not sure when, I picked up a pen and started shading in these abstract drawings. So it started from there – doing a lot of abstract stuff. I eventually worked my way into faces and inanimate objects.

Did you have any experience with Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator? Or was it just by hand?

At that time it was just by hand. My only experience was drawing in high school and middle school, but I still remember a time when I tried to use them in class. But I really didn’t have that kind of computer experience.

So it took you nearly a year to complete ‘Hero,’ right?

Yes, but if you do the math on the 210 hours it took to complete it, that’s about 8 days or something like that. However, it took a year only because I had to balance a lot of things at the same time. I was getting married in 2011, we just bought our first home, then there was the planning of our honeymoon, and working all at the same time. So it was very difficult to get more than 4-5 hours in a day on the drawing. There were times where I went a month without touching the drawing. So that’s why I say that although it took a year, I didn’t spend a year drawing it. I didn’t dedicate every hour of the day to the drawing. Although I hope to do that someday.

What instigated the idea? Were you just sitting around and decided to draw your dad?

I just wanted to do another type of study. I consider most of my drawings studies just because I think I’m still learning and I think that will always be the case. I don’t have that much experience drawing faces just because it’s so time-consuming. So every drawing that I do is a study and this one trying to do a detailed drawing of a person’s face. I thought it would be interesting to see the pores on the skin. You know, you usually see a portrait of somebody and you miss all of that.

I didn’t know who to do or how to do it, but I think my dad was over one day and he wore some shades or something like that. So I thought that would be interesting if I did his face just because his face has a lot of experience.

What about the angle? The final image made it seem as though his face was up against a scanner.

Originally I was planning to photograph him with glass on his face, but that was difficult without a good camera and it wouldn’t get good hi-res of the skin and the pores. So I thought the only way to do that inexpensively would be to xerox it or scan it. So used my scanner to scan his face in hi-res of almost 600 dpi which provided me with immense detail.

I did so many scans that I ended up just putting them together and kind of making my own final image. So the look you have know is not of one scan, but of probably 2 or 3 scans put together.

In the video, we see that there was a drawing phase before the ink dots. It was a very bold move to go with ink because mistakes are irreversible. So how did you go about that?

I do make mistakes, but I don’t think that they’re ever visible to the audience because it’s only you that knows. I mean, nobody knows – not even my wife. I try to point them out to her, but she never sees them. So places where I did make mistakes, I tried to mix them in with the background to make them fade away or I just moved to a different portion of the project and stop thinking about it.

I also had many mistakes that had nothing to do with drawing. I had a bloodstain on the drawing and I had no idea where it came from. Those were the kinds of stuff that I feared all the time because you can’t get rid of them. So I had to clean it quickly and scrape it off. Luckily, it came off.

What was the cause of the video going viral?

One of my best-friends put it online and she has a lot of followers. As soon as she put it on Facebook, it kind of went viral within her little community – a couple hundred people. Then it just took off from there. Within in 5 to 6 hours, it was on Reddit and that’s when it got almost a million hits in just a couple hours.

Are you planning on doing something like ‘Hero’ again? Or was this a one time study?

I’m not going to do anything like this again. I’d like to try something else. I’ll probably start another drawing in February or March. As for a video, I think I should! I got a lot of responses from the video. So I’m sure for my next drawing, a lot of people would expect one to see the design process. Maybe not the same way. It might be boring if it is so I’ll add a twist or something.

What do you like to do when you’re not designing or making videos?

That’s a hard question to answer. I usually pick up a new hobby every week. My wife makes fun of me all the time for that. I do a lot of running and I like to play around with music a lot, but in my free time, I still try to be creative online with videos, websites I design, photography, or anything that requires that creativity. I try to do that as much as I can.

And that’s the artist behind “Hero.” Find him on his personal site, Twitter, Tumblr, and of course Vimeo.