Your Toy Portrait - Custom Toy Portraits by Jennifer Maher » Sonja

Little Fatty Face

Jennifer At Your Toy Portrait — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 04:21:42 +0000

8″x10″ acrylic, 2012. In the delicious (but always a bit worrisome) lull which follows my anual holiday portrait blitz, I’m just painting what I like between my smattering of commissions. And I do like this duck! He’s one of a zillion that Sonja has managed to collect over the course of her four years, and, to me, he’s the best one. I absolutely adore how his double chin wraps around and connects to his back-of-the-neck fat. Hence his name: Little Fatty Face, which was originally my pet name for baby Sonja until I realized that it might scar her for life! But this duck has a flaw which he shares with about 90% of rubber ducks on the market, it seems: He floats on his side. What’s up, rubber duckie designers? Is form is more important that function? Well, I did choose to paint this one over other more upright, less adorable specimens…

Vintage Drawing Book: Make A World

Jennifer At Your Toy Portrait — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 18:13:35 +0000

It is an exciting and rare occasion in our house when my husband breaks out a mechanical pencil and starts to draw. He has always made tiny, meticulous renderings of long parades of vehicles, in recent years usually under the guise of an explanation or description of something for our daughter. I’ve always been baffled at how he can get the general abstract shape of a truck or a helicopter correct without looking at one. Well! Recently he stumbled upon this 1972 book “Make a World” by Ed Emberly and excitedly explained that he had obsessed over it as a child.
Inside are a zillion everyday objects broken down with charming simplicity and humor…

The tiny scale and blocky, basic instructional nature of these drawings appeals perfectly to Greg, who also adores models and Lego kits. So now, he has Sonja imagine a scenario for him to draw and he makes it come to life via the templates in this book. Below, “Two Dragons Getting Married.”

My sister Jill wondered how an animal drawn via this method would translate to full-page size…

Ha! I think it holds up!

The Tiniest Frame

Jennifer At Your Toy Portrait — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 04:01:30 +0000

My husband LOOOOVES things that are oddly tiny. Not regular miniature things, but things that mess with your sense of scale, like baby zucchini. One of the most exciting periods of his life was a few years ago when someone kept mysteriously leaving tiny chairs made of sticks around his workplace. And so, when our three-year-old daughter challenged him to build frames “like Mommy’s” for some expressionistic paintings she had made on 3-inch-square canvases, I knew we had lost him to the basement workshop for the forseeable future. Greg hand-builds all my toy portrait frames from lengths of pine trim, but for this project, he decided to go full-artisan. For about a year, he has been curing wood that he cut from one of the giant walnut trees in our back yard… You can see the place where he removed the branch (which had split during a storm) near the bottom of this photo. So he cut and planed the logs until he had very small, even strips… and then put together a simple box frame for Sonja’s little painting. I asked him if he wanted to offer home-grown walnut frames to my customers, he said, “Sure – $100 apiece!” And I bet there would be a year-long wait for the harvested-to-order wood to cure, too. So there you go! Any takers?

Choo Choo and Hoo Hoo

Jennifer At Your Toy Portrait — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 03:41:44 +0000

11″x14″ acrylic, 2009. Here’s an older sketch of two of Sonja’s little favorites. They are each about the size of an adult hand, and she has an assortment of animals about that size lined up along the top of her head board. I will admit that most of them were collected by my husband and myself long before she was born! Choo Choo Chicken was named when we found Sonja chewing on his foot as a baby… so I suppose that, really, we should spell it “Chew Chew?” It occured to me to post it today when I was amazed to stumble upon this post about a lost stuffed chicken identical to Choo Choo. We purchased ours from Target many years ago around Easter time, but I’ve never seen it anywhere since… hope they’re able to find another! Here are pre-Sonja portraits of Choo Choo and Hoo Hoo.

Order a print of this painting:

More info about prints here.

Toy/Portrait

Jennifer At Your Toy Portrait — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:52:37 +0000

8″x10″ acrylic, 2009. This painting of my daughter Sonja sort of qualifies as a toy portrait, in that she has a toy car in her hand. I’ve been known to depict the occasional human, so bring on any combination of toy, person, animal, and/or object you like and I’d be delighted to paint it for you!