Just a Simple Portrait?

Nice photo isn’t it? Yeah, except that it’s a detail from a painting.

The idea of this painting by artist Dru Blair was born out of a portrait workshop he taught in 2005. In that workshop, he presented his students with a photo he had taken of a local model. Their goal was to paint this photo and reproduce it as best as they could. After the class had ended, he decided to test the limits of his own painting skills and took it upon himself to recreate the photo, with pretty startling results.

The level of detail is simply stunning. For example, to reproduce the skin a combination of about 20 colors were used and even subtle visual elements in the original photo such as the halo effect on the earrings have been preserved in the painting. According the artist, 99% of the painting was done using airbrush, while other techniques involving colored pencil, x-acto knife and eraser were also used, especially to add realism to fine textures of the skin and hair.

Visit Dru Blair’s site here