Category — Commissions and Wedding Invitations

As a birthday present to his (former burlesque dancer) wife, Mike commissioned me to paint Maggie’s portrait, in a style based on my “Big Paintings of Sexy Women” series. When I went over to their place to sketch her, she showed me a few of the many drawings and paintings her grandfather did of her grandmother. They were RACY! My portrait was intended to be sexy enough to reflect that side of her and her family lineage, and tame enough to not make Mike’s family run screaming from their home.

“Maggie” 3′x 4′, acrylic on wood

When she and Mike came over to pick it up, I decided to make a to-do, and set up the painting on my easel in the middle of my studio and arranged a piece of heavy velvet over it (my bedroom curtain). I put on an evening gown, I gave them glasses of wine, and eventually unveiled the painting like a gameshow hostess.

Maggie had posed for me in two sittings, and I made the portrait from my pencil sketches and a bunch of reference photos.

Maggie emailed me a short video of walking into their home, and the first thing you see when you walk in their door is the portrait at the top of their staircase. “The reception of the portrait has been resoundingly fantastic. People have been impressed by your ability to make such a striking portrait and describe your work as so distinguishable.”

Continue on this post to see other paintings in the “Big Paintings of Sexy Women” series (note: NSFW, if your W isn’t cool with nudity).
[Read more →]

My newest commission was a portrait of the dearly departed cat of Robert Sondheim, co-owner of Rosebud. Erica kept him company for twenty years (!!) and he still keeps her two favorite toys where she left them on the floor. (Picks them up to vacuum. Puts them back.)

He asked me to draw her on a Persian rug, and to include a tiny bit of turquoise (to match his decor). Interestingly, he only had three photos of her, and I needed more for reference, so I asked him to find some other cats online that reminded him of her (the one on the far right is “Ingrid”):

He loved it and said the portrait looks just like her (whew!).

I finally decided to make a video of me folding and unfolding a few different designs of my custom wedding invitations. My most popular design, the “tri-fold,” is especially hard to conceptualize from 2-D drawings. This action-packed flick will be on the “Wedding Invitations” page of my site as soon as it’s updated (any minute now!).

For the first couple takes I still had chipped blue nail polish on. Oops! Not that I needed a fancy manicure (though that would’ve been nice!) but if nothing else it was distracting.

Lust and I have been getting some nice publicity recently: Seattlest just posted an interview, Seattle Magazine has a feature about me, Seattle Metropolitan included me in a feature on “15 People to Know for Spring Arts,” Modern Tonic posted a lovely review, there’s that interview at Newsarama and they also posted about my Lust downloadable wallpaper, there’s a 1/3-page review in ReadyMade magazine (though you can’t read it online), a review that I haven’t seen yet in Penthouse (!) and good grief, there are announcements for tomorrow’s book launch party all over the place, including “Stranger Suggests.”

From Seattle Magazine (photo by Richard Darbonne)

Also, a bunch of people in my yoga class bought copies as Valentine’s presents, including Denise, my beloved teacher and studio owner, and it was a kick to see everyone hand around my sample copy. (As always: “What’s pegging?”)

Romantic Alice and Ivan are getting married in Mexico. Here’s the outside of their card: