Matthew Hollister’s all-star project aims to illustrate every player in the NBA

After polishing off some portraits for Portland Monthly in the style of basketball cards, illustrator and basketball fanatic Matthew Hollister’s friend joked that he should draw every basketball player in the NBA. “We laughed it off, but I couldn’t get the idea out of my head,” Matthew says. It obviously stuck with him because Matthew is the man behind Every Player in the League, an ambitious personal project hosted on Tumblr for which he has created and published an astonishing 313 illustrated portraits of NBA players so far, and shows little sign of stopping. He is slowly working his way through an alphabetical catalogue of players from the 2013-2014 season for the card-style portraits, and he tells me, “the end of the list is barely in sight.”

A graduate of the illustrious Pratt Institute in New York, Matthew is a Seattle-based illustrator who splits his time between commercial clients like Nike, Sony Music, and Airbnb, and editorial work for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal. Every Player in the League caught our eye for the skill of its finish as much as for Matthew’s sheer commitment. Swish!