Imaginative Family Portraits

The last few months have challenged me with a few opportunities to create portrait work. This is something I decided a couple months back that I would like to consider pursuing in a bit more depth. While portraits have never been my specialty and while I do struggle with them I think I found a couple of niches that work for me and give great results for the client and that I enjoy doing. One of those styles is the new style I'm calling "Imaginative Family Portraits". When I told a friend about this he asked me if I was painting an imaginary family for a guy who doesn't actually have a family.

What it actually is is to use various pictures of a family as photo reference and sort of collage them together if needed to get the best qualities from each photo. Then the really imaginative part is in the background or in how we chose to portray those figures. In doing this we end up with various photo references with various lighting situations so I basically have to imagine the light on their faces and often find other photo references to draw the folds on the clothing and such. It's a far cry from having the family sit in front of me to paint or just using one photo to copy meticulously. In the end it's not a traditional sort of portraiture at all but serves as an interesting conversation piece that hopefully at least captures their likenesses.  For this particular image we went through a number of ideas and decided on showing his family snuggled into a background displaying the various family vacations they had been on.

We also worked in various other interesting tid bits from the family personalities like colleges they attended, the restaurant the parents went on their first date at etc.

I would be interested in doing more of this sort of project for the right price. I've done four of these so far and each of them has fallen between 100-200 hrs. from start to finish! So they aren't cheap but could be just the thing for anyone looking for a memorable gift you can't get just anywhere. Feel free to contact me for a quote or inquiries, matthew.gauvin@gmail.com Another style of portraiture I've been experimenting is similar to caricature. I'll show some pics for that image in another post tomorrow.