Hyper Realistic Pencil Drawing Art - 80 Hours Spent Creating

We all enjoyed drawing with color pencils when we were young, but as we got older, we stopped. Well, one guy never stopped drawing and has now perfected drawing lifelike images that look like photographs with just color pencils. Meet Sean McKenzie, hello, who goes by the name of Knee Yellow Drawings on YouTube and is located in Bendigo, Australia. Now before you start thinking this guy must be some kind of savant or has a lifetime of experience and practice to draw like this. Sean put up a video showing what his drawing skills look like in 2009 and what they had increased to in 2016. And the difference between his 2016 drawings compared to his 2019 drawings have improved just as dramatically. Sean has always had a strong interest in drawing his whole life, but one day he saw a colored lifelike drawing on YouTube and But he was curious with just how far he could draw realistically, as he believed there must be a limit. So he set himself a goal to create the most realistic drawing on planet Earth. He said it's a bit of a weird goal, but he loves a challenge and this challenge gave him great motivation. Sean said, if you're going to do something, then shoot for the stars. It's amazing how much time and effort is involved in creating one of these images. When you watch one of these videos, he stays in one small area such as an eye or a nose for like 45 minutes and just perfects that area until it's lifelike, then moves on to a different part of the face. Sean told me it can take anywhere from 60 to 80 hours to complete a portrait to this high level of detail. He said his fastest drawing took him 15 hours and his longest drawing took him 280 hours. Now you might think it would not cost much to make one of these drawings, just some color pencils, but Sean explained, once you include new pencils to match the skin tones of the subject, new pencil sharpeners for every job to keep those pencils razor sharp, the special paper he draws on, the special photo paper he prints the image on that he will be copying, printer ink and various other items, it cost him around $120 per drawing. Now of course that doesn't include the hours he spends on the drawing itself, just the consumables he uses to create the drawing. Now at this point you might be expecting me to say he sells the finished artwork for thousands of dollars, maybe even tens of thousands, but the truth is Sean has struggled to find buys for his art because of the hours he puts into them. He should be charging a fairly high amount as 80 hours per drawing is about a two weeks wage worth of work. Now even though these drawings are of such high quality, Sean does not believe they are art gallery worthy, which in my humble little opinion is nonsense. I have seen the kinds of art in art galleries and they are rubbish by comparison to these portraits, but then again I'm no art critic, I just know what I like. Sean is currently not earning any money from his drawings other than from the views on his YouTube videos while he records himself drawing a new portrait. At one stage to help pay the bills and support his passion he got a tattoo apprenticeship as he was told it was probably the only way he would earn good money as an artist. It's a real shame that someone with such artistic skills that creates some amazing photorealistic hand drawings cannot make a living out of his work other than on YouTube. So I would like to ask everyone watching this video, please go subscribe to Sean's YouTube channel Knee Yellow Drawings, the link is below and watch some of his videos and share his channel and work on your social media. Let's try and help this guy out as he clearly deserves it. The last time I asked my viewers to go subscribe to the subject in the video was Republic Attack who had his Lego stolen and we ended up getting him 500,000 new subscribers. Let's try and get Sean at least half that amount. Anyway that's the end of this video, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. Bye bye.