Caesar of the Wilderness Work In Progress

I am a big fan of pencil portrait artist Armin Mersmann, if you're not familiar with his work his website is well worth a visit. So inspired by his work I wanted to attempt a highly detailed portrait in a similar style. Now I know I'm not of his calibre, he can take up to a year to complete one of his pieces. This portrait took me just under a week.

Measuring 11.5 x 16 inches and created using graphite pencil on Bristol board. It is a portrait of 17th century explorer and adventurer Pierre-Esprit Radisson, my impression of how he may have looked. There is a larger image of the finished work on the Mighty Fine Art website. On there I have also written a short passage about his life which some may find interesting.

This first picture represents my first day's work, a total of about 6 hours. Being right handed I like to work left to right, top to bottom as much as possible to avoid smudging although I constantly re-visit the area I've done to make fine adjustments to tonal values and corrections where necessary.

This is the point I reached after the second day. I can see the eyes are not quite right, the left one being a little smaller than the right, but now they are in I can see the portrait is going to work OK. I notice I also need to adjust the tones of his cheek.



Now I have adjusted the eyes and cheek a bit I'm much happier. Having completed quite a large proportion of the portrait to the 'almost finished' stage I've got more of an idea in my head of how I want the final composition to look, so at this point I've also started to lightly plan what I'm going to do with the remaining space. This is the end of the third day.


End of day four and I feel I'm getting there now. It doesn't appear that I've done all that much but a lot of time went into the beard and tidying up other areas.

At this point it looks nearly finished. However I need to go over the entire picture now, paying particular attention to how the edges of the fur meet the dark background which has been darkened and burnished within an inch of it's life to achieve the flat blackness that I want.
And here it is finished. I'm really pleased with this one. I set out to achieve more than just an ordinary portrait. I wanted show this mans character and story from the look in his eyes to the lines on his face. I've dug deep into my imagination for this and I hope this portrait in some way will stimulate the imagination of the viewers too. Please note, this is not intended to be an accurate illustration of Radisson, rather an imaginative and perhaps romanticised artistic impression.