One’s passion for art generally begins to express itself with doodling. But, Heather Rooney, an American artist, seemed to have skipped this step entirely as she took up the challenge to draw realistically…so realistic, in fact, that there is hardly anything to distinguish her renderings from actual photographs!
Rooney is certainly a gifted artist who is an expert in creating photorealistic portraits and drawings using colored pencil and graphite. How this 25-year-old artist got hooked on this is interesting. According to her, “After the first portrait I drew in my high school art class, I became captivated with the challenge of photorealistic drawing and the meticulous attention to detail that is required.”
Such was Rooney’s passion for this labor-intensive art that she felt driven to continue improving her skill. She enrolled in Emmanuel College in Boston, Massachusetts to pursue art from where she graduated with a BA in studio art. In college, she utilized all her free time in drawing portraits that used to take anywhere from several to hundreds of hours, depending upon its complexity.
By and by, Rooney had in her kitty portraits of celebrities, athletes, public figures, and other familiar faces. With the growing popularity of social media platforms, she uploaded not only her drawings and portraits but also time-lapse videos of her lengthy drawing process.
The instant popularity of her artwork surprised even Rooney, as her diehard fans crossed the figure of 300K+. Today, she boasts of a large global audience.
Heather Rooney