Portrait of John McCormick

[Armin Mersmann]

Thank you Pat and Jeff, I appreciate the questions and comments very much.

The dark background is just graphite, I use a very small size pencil, .5 and .3 (softness B and 2B), to accomplish this. The small leads keep me from indenting the drawing board and leave no visible lines or the shine you get with larger wood incased pencils.

I draw in small circles over numerous hours; an average drawing of this type can take from 100 to 200 hours, much of it spent on the background.

An important part to this is spraying very lightly with mat fixative when it

[Lon Haverly]

Beautiful work, Armin. It is a style quite opposite of mine. I am far too A.D.S. to draw this way. I admire good realism. There is so much bad realism out there. This is a labor of love. I can tell.