Hyperrealistic portraits with details that include every skin pore on the subject’s face

“My goal isn’t to replicate a picture by hand. My goal is to give life to it. To make viewers feel what the model or I feel,” says Matteo Zoccheddu.

During this period of distance, his mind kept bringing him back to this passion from time to time, even though he is convinced it was useless.

Italian artist Matteo Zoccheddu has a keen eye for details. You can clearly see this in his hyperrealistic charcoal portraits that take months to complete, with details that include every skin pore on a person’s face.

Since a very young age, Matteo has always been captivated by art and particularly realism.

After spending his childhood drawing anime characters, one day he decides to, as a joke, make a portrait of his grandfather and that will be the beginning of a passion he had never considered before.

Thanks to YouTube, he is now able to see what real hyperrealistic artists can do and spends countless hours watching those videos, viewing the process of a portrait from start to finish.

But he doesn’t only watch. He practices every moment he can, experimenting with different styles and all kinds of materials. He has become obsessed with details and the search for perfection only for his own amusement. In fact, he didn’t know that with this kind of art, one could make a living, sometimes even a great living, so he stopped before his 20’s.

During this period of distance, his mind kept bringing him back to this passion from time to time, even though he is convinced it was useless. Almost a decade later, joining social media, he is now aware of the vast world of realistic drawings and has started posting his works. After receiving very positive feedback from the community, he decided to take this more seriously and started drawing for many hours every day, rapidly improving and gradually incrementing the difficulty of every new portrait.

He started making portraits of celebrities he admires, like Daniel Radcliffe from the Harry

Potter saga or Hayao Miyazaki, the great director father of the Ghibli movies.

He soon decides to stop with celebrity portraits feeling the need to create something unique that can’t be easily copied by everyone so he buys himself a camera and starts taking pictures himself and studying photography on the side.

Not only can he now make unique art, but he also has access to more details that the low-quality images from the internet didn’t have and this allows him to put those details in his new artworks, increasing the level of his works even more and that’s one of the things that keep him motivated. The prospect of improving every day and the desire to push his limits more and more.