Ralph Ellison

Here's a portrait of Ralph Ellison, author of "Invisible Man", done for AD Michael Hogue at the Dallas Morning News. Michael suggested that we try to work in the idea of an "Invisible Man" somehow, so I thought that having the head fade in and out of the book's pages might be a good idea.

On the technical side of things, I messed around with some of the charcoal papers and brushes in Painter X, but that program is so slow that it started to drive me crazy. So I finished painting in Photoshop using a bunch of different brushes.

One of the things I like about doing portraits of authors is that I usually get sucked into their work and discover some great writing. I'm embarrassed that I hadn't read this great work before and I'm enjoying it quite a bit.