Chuck Close is best known for his photo-realistic giant portraits. As the name suggest, the intent of a photorealistic painter is to make the painting exactly like a photograph and Chuck Close was one the greatest of all time at doing do. To create his uncanny duplicates of photographs, Close put a grid pattern on the photograph and on the canvas and proceeded to duplicated it cell by cell. His tools for this included an airbrush, rags, razor blade, and a home made electric eraser which he fashioned by mounting an eraser onto a power drill. His first painting with this method was created in 1968 titled Big Self Portrait; a black and white enlargement of his face onto a 9 by 7 foot canvas. It took three months to create.
