Pencil Drawings That Look Like Blurry Vintage Photos

Aug. 31, 2011

Perhaps we’ve been on a bit of a kick lately, but these miniature, pencil-drawn reproductions of black and white photographs by Edinburgh-based artist Paul Chiappe are too amazing not to share with you guys. A large part of that has to do with his interesting choice of subject matter — a mixture of old class photos and yearbook portraits. But what makes his work even more interesting is the fact that each of the tiny pieces, while incredibly detailed and photorealistic, looks faded and slightly out of focus. “I tend to work very slowly, to try not to breathe too much when I’m producing the piece so my hand’s not shaking all over the place,” he told The Scotsman in 2008. “It’s a very long process. The tiny single heads, you do need a magnifying glass to look at them. Some of them are so small that people can’t even see them using a magnifying glass, but they are actually there.” Click through for a slide show of our favorites.