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

Asa

Jennifer At Your Toy Portrait — Thu, 03 May 2012 04:42:09 +0000

6″x8″ acrylic on cardboard, 2012. This painting, the second of two portrait gifts for Kathleen from Paul, features their three-year-old son Asa. I have experienced Asa’s ardor for trucks and trains first-hand, as Asa and Sonja sometimes get to play together. He imbues them with vigorous, joyful personalities, and expresses his deepest good will by offering his favorites to his playmates to borrow. It was such a pleasure to paint his sweet, striking face, which in person is incredibly animated — Paul tells me that it was nearly impossible to get him to be still long enough for a decent photo! Here are my recent portraits of Sonja and Asa side-by-side:

Fisher Price Family

Jennifer At Your Toy Portrait — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 04:01:11 +0000

6″x8″ acryic on cardboard, 2012. Here’s a symbolic portrait of our family, each of us represented by a vintage Fisher-Price Little Person. My husband’s incredibly sentimental response to the piece was, of course, “Where’s my hair?” If you’d like a Little People portrait of your own family, please be in touch!

Sonja With Braids

Jennifer At Your Toy Portrait — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:03:58 +0000

5″x7″ acrylic on cardboard, 2012. Took a break from the toys to paint my favorite little face… Sonja is four, and I think I’m going to try to make yearly portraits of her from now on. Is it evident that I love the Andrew Wyeth Helga paintings? Sonja’s braids definitely conjured them for me!

Hamtaro and Totoro, take 4

Jennifer At Your Toy Portrait — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 16:15:03 +0000

8×10 acrylic on cardboard, 2012. These two are long-time V.I.P. toys in our house, and this is my fourth portait of them! The first two versions were puchased off the walls of exhibits, and the third was commissioned by someone who had seen the second but didn’t get to it before it sold. My husband and I originally bought the foot-tall Hamtaro in 2004 as a sort of mascot for his Toyota Matrix, which we called “The Hamster.” We bought the little Totoro for Sonja, hoping she would love the movie as much as we do (and she does!) I got myToulouse Lautrec on with this portrait, which is painted on a piece of cardboard that has been calling to me from the back of one of Sonja’s activity books for weeks!

Owl Finger Puppet

Jennifer At Your Toy Portrait — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 03:13:10 +0000

8″x10″ acrylic, 2012. We bought three of these little guys in different colors from the gift shop at the wonderful Saratoga Children’s Museum. Sonja barely had to point at them and I was already gathering them up, saying, “of course we’re getting these!” I actually don’t often encounter toys that I’m moved to buy, but when I do, there is no hesitation. Rarely one to use a toy for its intended purpose, today Sonja stuffed this poor finger-puppet full to bursting with “noise putty.” Fun! And gross!

Curious George

Jennifer At Your Toy Portrait — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 15:07:43 +0000

8″x10″ acrylic, 2012. Rather than languish in my post-holiday slow season, I’ve embarked on a series of portraits of classic toys. Here’s a jaunty stuffed Curious George… he’s trying to get the attention of my daughter, to no avail. Like most little kids, she does not value toys for their classic-ness, and currently would rather focus on future classics such as the Octonauts. Sorry, George!

Raggedy Ann

Jennifer At Your Toy Portrait — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 18:16:47 +0000

8″x10″ acrylic, 2012. This vintage 1970’s Knickerbocker Raggedy Ann is identical to the one I had when I was little. Mine is long gone, as her face was irreparably loved right off! I bought this one (along with an Andy) off of Etsy for Sonja’s recent fourth birthday. So far, she is fairly indifferent to it, but I’m hoping that she will eventually discover what an ideal sleeping companion this doll is. I have very strong sense memories of her firm flatness against me and the comforting, yarny smell of her hair. I was thrilled that the fabric of the dress is even the exact same soft, lightweight cotton with a tiny flowered print, and also to find the heart containting the words “I Love You” printed on her chest that I remember so well.
Sonja actually did instigate this painting, saying, “Mommy, I think I want a portrait of Raggedy Ann.”
“Sure, I can paint her for you,” I said.
“No, I’M going to do it,” she insisted. So we sat down together and worked on our respective versions!

Little Fatty Face

Jennifer At Your Toy Portrait — Sat, 04 Feb 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?