You Won't Believe How This Portrait of Morgan Freeman Was Made
A digital artist spent more than 200 hours painting the actor on an iPad.
Dec. 3, 2013 — -- No, that's not a photograph of Morgan Freeman. It's a painting.
If you are staring at it and you're still not convinced, watch the video above to see how it was made completely on the iPad using just a finger.
Yes, that ultra-detailed painting was done by a 26-year-old visual artist in Cheshire, England, named Kyle Lambert. With 285,000 brush strokes, Lambert spent over 200 hours working on the finest details in the painting -- the hairs in Freeman's beard, the detail in his lips -- with just his fingers. If you're wondering how he was able to get so precise, he said he "reduced the brush size to a few pixels, pinched to zoom and carefully painted in the fine detail."
The original photo of Freeman, which Lambert worked off of, was taken by Scott Gries.
Equally impressive might be the time-lapse video he created to show how he pulled off the life-like portrait. Lambert said a feature in the Procreate app lets you capture the painting session over time. The three-minute video, which has now been viewed on YouTube more than 1.3 million times in just 24 hours, captures over 200 hours of work.
This isn't the first video showing off Lambert's iPad art talents, though. In 2010 his iPad painting of Beyonce also spread around the Web. He said he hopes the videos will "inspire other budding artists to embrace digital art."
We'll stop talking about the painting now and let you watch it for yourself.
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