Portrait of my brother

After the snowy trees, I decided I wanted to have another go at painting a portrait.  People are hard to draw and getting a likeness is fiendishly difficult but it can be achieved with practice.

I had in mind a close-up profile photo of my brother taken by his wife on holiday, which I particularly liked.

I decided I would use A5 canvas board again, and started to sketch him out on the board.

As the likeness grew, and I was enjoying the way the graphite was moving around on the canvas board (you can smudge it very easily with your fingers to get shadows and texture), then I made a decision to keep it as a pencil portrait and not to paint over it with acrylic.  Because while it was coming along in pencil, and actually starting to look like my brother, chances are plastering over it with acrylic would ruin it and he'd end up looking like something from a freak show!

So it has remained a pencil drawing, started and finished on 20 May 2013,  and a not too bad one to boot:



And the success of doing this one led me to do the next one...