Materials: ballpoint pen + colored pencils

Time: 20 hours

Reference: photo of my friend and his husband from their 2015 holiday card. I wanted more practice drawing smiles and I loved both of their smiles in the photo. I also wanted to try drawing two faces in the same sketch.

Comments: this was the most challenging and most enjoyable portrait so far! For some reason I felt more pressure to do a good job on this drawing… maybe because they are faces of friends rather than celebrities so I thought their portrait deserved even more respect. Drawing two faces at the same time was difficult. I had originally planned to finish one face completely and then draw the other, but in order to balance the darkness of shading I had to keep switching back and forth between the two. Since finishing this portrait, I have realized that the blackness of the ink tends to fade slightly over the next couple days… I should have returned to this drawing to darken the ink and even out the shading a few days later.

“I do have my own personal convictions and values, and I live by those. But as an artist… my job is to tell the truth and to capture someone’s spirit on a certain day. And it’s never the whole truth; it’s the truth I experience in a very intense and intimate fashion.”
– Platon (New Republic, A Conversation with Platon, 2013)