I was was honoured to be commissioned to create portraits of these four brothers. I love making linocut portraits. Distilling someone’s facial features down to relatively few lines is a challenge, but it’s also fairly straightforward.

I’ve refined my approach over the years: I use photographic reference and quick pencil sketches to start and then good ol’ Photoshop to tweak the size and position of features (it’s amazing how a very slight change to the eyes’ size, angle and distance apart affects the likeness). Once I’m happy with the likeness, I retrace with ink to give it a loose feel, then transfer the image to the block and start carving.