*Count yourself pretty hard to impress if you don’t find this portrait of actor Morgan Freeman to be absolutely AMAZING. An 18-year-old British artist used his fingers to create the ultra-realistic picture of the actor – capturing all the characteristics we have come to know him by. The distinguished gray hair, calm, direct stare, on a face punctuated with tiny moles.
Artist Jack Ede spent a period of 137 hours to create this drawing of the actor and documented his step-by-step process via Instagram and YouTube.
Ede says Freeman has always been his favorite actor.
The artist makes his living doing freelance work, and told Yahoo News. “I always wanted to draw him but I never had time due to commissions, so I eventually just made time.”
Working from his Sleaford, Lincolnshire home, Ede documented his progress on Instagram, which allowed his thousands of followers inside the delicate process.
“After 2 hours of endless frustration caused by a million measurements and a million mistakes I’ve finally managed to sketch the outlines and structure of this piece,” Ede wrote on Nov. 5 about the outline sketch shown directly below.
“I’m glad that’s done but I’ve come to the conclusion that this will be at least 200-250 hours of work and will probably take me until after Christmas to complete as I’ll be doing commissions and other drawings as well. This is really gonna test my patience,” he adds.
“3 hours in and Mr. Freeman is currently looking like E.T.,” he wrote about the one-eyed picture below. “Not sure whether to sleep or carry on drawing.”
“Think I’ve made a fair bit of progress today,” Ede wrote, as we can clearly see the face of the actor developing in the rendering directly below. “Starting to get a bit scary, feels like Morgan’s staring at me.”
I guess Ede got very little sleep as he appears to have completed the work sooner than he expected. “Finally finished my portrait of Morgan Freeman!” he announced triumphantly on Nov. 18. See the finished work directly below.
“Done completely in Prismacolor and Faber-Castell pencils on Frisk A2 Bristol board (16″x21″). Took me 137 hours over the space of 2 weeks. #morganfreeman.”
It’s not the first time Morgan Freeman has been hyperrealistically — and painstakingly — rendered.
Last year, it took Kyle Lambert over 200 hours and 285,000 brushstrokes using an iPad application to create this digital portrait of Freeman.
Lambert documented his work in a time-lapse video. See it below:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEdRLlqdgA4]
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