Pencil portrait reveal

This is a vertical piece revealing a commissioned pencil portrait: a wedding couple at the centre with their family drawn around them. The product is a picture, which makes filming it harder rather than easier.

Framelink Media lit and framed it to keep the paper. Graphite is reflective and a flat light turns a drawing into a grey rectangle, so the frame holds a slight rake across the surface and the grade protects the white of the page rather than lifting it.

The purple ground was chosen to sit behind it. A pencil drawing against white is two whites arguing, and a colour behind the paper is what makes the edges of the work visible.

The move ends on the two faces at the centre, which is the part the person who commissioned it will look at first and the part any future customer is judging it by. Everything before it in the move is there to arrive at that moment rather than to show the whole sheet.