Abraham Lincoln Relief

After finishing most of the composers for the series of reliefs I've been making for a client, he started me on Abraham Lincoln. I went through some designs early on, though I didn't really receive any feedback before one was chosen. I specifically wanted to avoid anything reminiscent of the two Lincoln's we see on almost a daily basis. The hybrid photo (a torso and a head) that I used for this piece is clean shaven because I felt that we're too used to seeing the stylized bearded Lincoln. I had also hoped that we might zoom out more to show some of Lincoln's torso since there is so much character in his posture but I didn't get a chance to explore that. The base itself uses details from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., mainly in the columns and stairs.

The finished piece is a long way from where I started with Giuseppe Verdi. The proportions are very close to the photo I used for reference and the depth is much more appropriately distributed. Torsos seem to fall into place extremely easily and the only real challenging areas tend to be the more organic ones. These renders, as with all of my reliefs, are using fake MatCap materials so that you can see more of the details at once.