The only person in the image with a photo that contained enough details is the guy in the middle. The other guys were too small or blurry to get the likeness I would expect. I find that realistic portraits are an arena where perfectionism can take a good hold of you, as it takes very little before the person does not look like the person anymore. The shape of a shade, the angle of the eyes, the curve of the upper lip. If I was to do this again, it would be with a different and more loose approach, that would leave room for errors.

I was not sure how to approach a finished piece. You can’t just pencil draw on a copy paper, it needs a finish that looks a bit luxorious and special. I initially wanted to try mono printing, but found a few issues. First, the photo has too many details, so the tracing method didn’t work, the lines got really mushy.

Second, trying to draw over soy oil print color does not work, the oil is a bad material to draw on, and i ruined a few pens. If i had used water soluble colors it might have worked better. But, I felt I was working against what the materials offered, and had to kill this darling.

Drawing on 300mg watercolor paper offered a good solution, I could still see through the paper on. light board, to check my tracing. The pencil and pen soaked nicely into the paper, and i could add both watercolor and watercolor pencils to get an interresting background so that the drawing did not float in thin air.