Custom Portrait/Etsy

I’ve been painting custom portraits and yesterday I took a little leap of faith and put an offer on Etsy to sell custom portraits.  I set up my Etsy shop and will soon be listing some finished pieces and some made to order portraits.  So check it out!  If you have a photo of a child, teenager, you, or a pet, I’d love to paint it for you.

My store name on Etsy is JillMillwardARTWORK

And here’s another portrait I love:

The style on this one is looser and their faces are more abstracted and stylized than the senior portrait above, and to me their faces feel very alive.

Today I will pick up a bunch of my work that I had professionally photographed/scanned at Evermore, an art print reproduction place.  I’m excited to see how the images look.  I will post them one at a time.

As for my portraits, I work from photographs.  I’m 100% certain that I could work from life, but it’s hard to do when working with kids or painting a portrait of someone that is in another state or country, or simply doesn’t want to sit for many many hours. And over a period of days and weeks as oil paints dry and layers are built up.  Light is also hard to control.  I probably don’t even need to say it but 100% of the professional artists I know work from photos some of the time if not always.  There’s always a point when you move away from the photo and create your own thing.  It’s not cheating and certainly doesn’t minimize or lessen anyones work if a photograph is involved.  Whatever gets you there.