All that Gltters..

One of the Xmas presents we made for Xmas was portrait of our newly born niece Anja, I had liked one lovely picture of her with her tongue sticking out, her parents describe it as her Oscar winning full-tard look, so i used it as the basis of the picture.


Pencil and the yellow background.


Red outline to back up the pencil marks.


The pencil marks rubbed out, now she looks like a planet of the apes human mutant.

Chunks of the shading, in pinks and light brown washes.

Blue for the eyes.

More shading and the finer details, bit of ginger for her fine baby hair, yes my niece is a ginger.

With white for the final highlights and my work is done on the picture and the horrible realization creeps into my brain that since I can paint babies, then perhaps I should paint more because there is money in painting babies.

Then I hand the picture over to my wife Jill to complete the background in her own unique style.

Big blocks of red, as she heads towards a Russian religious icon style.

Purple paint and Anja starts to look like a jester.

The first of many layers of gold paint, glitter and sequins, several graft sets worth.

Even more glitter and gold.

Yet more glitter, I have to point out that she applies all these tiny sparkles/spangles whilst sitting on our bed, so drifts of them accumulate in the sheets. This means that no matter how many times we change the sheets still we wake up with bits of glitter affixed to our bodies.


Finally with some dark purple paint and silver glitter the sticking is finished and a spay or two of gloss fixes all the sparkles and this most unique of baby portraits is finished.

Anja's parents were happy to receive this gift, whilst Anja is perhaps to young to recognize herself as a piece of art, she is happy to spend hours staring at the glitter.