This was a photograph which was taken in mid 2003. I sketched it later on a 6"X8" paper with graphite pencils and charcoal pastel dust rubbed to create the black cloudy background. This was in the early days of my foray into serious pencil sketching and you can see many mistakes that I have made.

One of the areas I constantly struggled with in the early days of sketching was cloth drapes. You can see the folds of clothing on my father, it looks too plastic. Even the anatomical details of the left hand are slightly incorrect, in terms of veins and muscles. After this sketch, I spent considerable time reading and practicing drapes and anatomical details. You can see some significant improvements in drape sketching in Pieta and improvement over the anatomical details of hand sketching in Father's Pride.