Draw photorealistic portraits with charcoal, carbon and pastel

My name is John Gilchrist. I was born in Govan in Glasgow and but have lived in Paisley all my life. I enjoyed art when I was at school and always like to draw in my spare time. In my teens, I always loved to draw the Marvel superheros and then became obsessed with drawing the late great Bruce Lee.

Art has always been just a hobby for me. I did wee bits here and there over the years but never anything serious until a couple of years ago when I saw hyper-realism art on Instagram and it inspired me to get the Pencils back out again.

For my first couple of years, I practiced different techniques using graphite pencil which gave me good results that I was happy with at the time, but then I started to introduce Charcoal, carbon and pastel into my work to remove the shine from the graphite. Although it is going in the right direction and I find my work is getting better. I still can’t get the true result I’m looking for and still feel there is a lot of room for improvement. Forever learning.

My latest piece was done in a combination of Charcoal and Pastel and although I’m happy with it I am still not getting tones the way I want them. Tones make all the difference to making it look realistic detail is not everything. ~ John Gilchrist