I first saw Paul Chiappe’s amazing pencil drawings a few months back at VoltaNY and was reminded yesterday when I was looking through my iPhoto gallery for something else and spotted photos I had taken of his work that day.

At first glance, I thought I was looking at a wall of blurred old yearbook photos, which in itself held some interest, but when I realized that these were in fact pencil drawings, well, I was completely awestruck. I had such a hard time believing it that I kept asking the gallery representative if she was sure that they were all pencil drawings. Surely some were photoshopped images. Maybe she had misunderstood. Maybe I had misunderstood. No. These small-sized (the largest are postcard size), hyper-realistic  portraits and group photos are all drawn by hand by artist Paul Chiappe of Edinburgh, Scotland. It would be impressive enough if these were in focus, but to be able to render the blurred aspect takes it to the next level.

You can see more of Chiappe’s incredible work on his site and at Madder139.