On January 26th, the world lost the famous NBA player Kobe Bryant. The news was sudden, unexpected and tragic.
People all over the world experienced this loss and could not believe the news. Across social media and on the streets, grief over the loss of the player expressed. Alongside him, his daughter, Gigi also lost her life.
During the last few weeks, murals and paintings of Kobe have come up across walls and buildings. The artists and painters are paying their tribute to the player in their own way.
Levi Ponce, an artist had created a painting of Kobe in 2016. He told ET exclusively, "I painted him in 2016 when he retired and I didn't think I'd be painting him again so quickly, and definitely not under these circumstances". He also mentioned to ET, "But me and a group of friends who all paint, we got together the next day and we said, 'You know, we should do something,' and the stars aligned."
Ponce's vision was to create a mural that showed Kobe's entire life and not just his life as a basketball player. He mentioned, "When I first painted him, he had retired so I mostly did a Laker thing. But I wanted to do something a little bigger than that. So we alluded to life outside of basketball as well and so we just wanted to paint a bigger picture with this mural."
It took the artist and his colleagues who joined hands three days to paint the mural. Since then, many other murals and paintings have propped up in Los Angeles.
You can see some of the artwork created by people in the images below.
