I finally finished it this morning After a few weeks of working on it I'm finally done, minus the signature (I have to figure out a good place to put it) If you saw the 2 WIP scraps of this piece you already know a bit about it, but for the rest of you, this piece was done as a project for my art class, and a few pieces from the class get chosen to be displayed in a college art exhibit here in BC to represent our highschool.

I wanted to do a different style of self portraiture and make it original and meaningful as well as encorporate my love of photography and drawing. The use of my hands holding the picture together is supposed to symbolize how many people like to keep everything in their lives together by themselves(including myself), and the sullen look on my face represents how trying to 'hold yourself together' can be emotionally straining. It's impossible to be perfect or to keep everything together on your own. That's sort of the general idea behind the portrait.

Medium: graphite
Size: 14"X 20"
Tools: Staedtler Mars Lumograph graphite pencils (HB, 2B, 4B, 6B, 8B<--I used an entire 8B doing the background ), kneaded eraser, masking tape, tissue, blending stump
Photo references: original photo - [link]
idea reference from original photo- [link]
Time: I didn't really count, but I'd estimate...about 15-20 hours, the longest I've ever taken on a drawing

*full-view recommended* when I get my scanner I'll get a sharper image of it on here...

side-note: I'm making limited prints of this offline, but I will be selling some of them on ebay. This will be done after I've graduated so keep an eye out if you're interested, I'll be posting the link to the ebay account on here. Thanks!