Baby portraits
A baby portrait from the photographs you have
Oil on canvas, painted from the first photographs — including the ones taken badly, at close range, in a dim room at six in the morning.
A baby's head is not a small adult head. The cranium takes up most of it and the face sits low and small beneath a forehead that runs almost to the crown; the eyes are large and set wide, and the nose has no bridge to speak of, only a soft button with two shadows under it. Paint those proportions as an adult's and you get a miniature grown-up, which is the most common failure in baby portraits and the reason some of them look faintly uncanny.
The second thing is skin. Baby skin has almost no light-to-dark range: forehead, cheek and chin sit within a couple of values of each other, and the form is carried by temperature rather than tone — a cool grey-pink in the shadow, warmth on the cheek, a faint blue at the temple where the vein runs. A painter who reaches for contrast to make the face read produces something that looks like a doll, or like a much older child. Both are failures of nerve as much as of technique: the painting gets pushed until it feels finished, and by then the baby has gone.
Why a baby's face is mostly forehead
Measure a newborn photograph and the eyes sit at, or slightly below, the middle of the head; in an adult they sit near the halfway line as well, but the baby's face below the eyes is compressed into a much smaller space, so the forehead and the top of the skull dominate everything. The chin is small and set back, the jaw is soft, and full cheeks push the mouth into a small shape in the middle.
That is a drawing problem before it is a painting problem. Most of the work is getting the eye line low enough and the forehead tall enough, then resisting the urge to add structure that is not there yet — cheekbones, a nose bridge, a defined jaw. Babies do not have those, and painting them in ages the child by five years in the eyes of everyone who knows them.
The phone-photo problem is distance, not megapixels
Everyone photographs a baby from about twenty centimetres away, because that is where the baby is. A phone lens at that distance is a wide angle doing what wide angles do: enlarging whatever is nearest, which is the nose and the forehead, and shrinking whatever is furthest, which is the ears and the back of the skull. The result is a face that is recognisably your baby and geometrically wrong.
Stand a metre and a half back and crop afterwards, even if the baby then fills a quarter of the frame; a modern phone carries more than enough resolution for that. If the only photographs are close-ups, we can partly correct the distortion in the mock-up, but starting from something honest is better. Two or three frames in window light, one of them at the baby's eye level, will carry a painting.
Asleep or awake, and what we will not invent
A sleeping baby is a beautiful subject and a different painting: the lids are closed, the lashes lie on the cheek, and the whole face relaxes downward in a way an open-eyed photograph cannot show. If you want the eyes open, send a photograph where they are open. Opening closed eyes is invention — we would be guessing at the lid crease and the set of the iris, and parents notice immediately, even when they cannot say what is wrong.
Hair is the last passage and the least literal. Newborn hair is closer to smoke than to fur: it sits on the scalp in wisps, it has no hard edge, and painted as a solid mass it makes the head look like a wig. We use a dry brush over a warm underpainting and let the scalp show through, which is also how it looks in life under a window.
Feet and hands appear in most baby photographs and are quietly cropped out by painters who find them awkward. A newborn foot is a set of overlapping shapes with almost no straight lines in it, and it is often the thing parents remember from the first month — the size of it next to an adult hand. If the photograph has a hand curled around a finger, we keep it; that is the only scale reference in the picture.
What it costs
Price is set by canvas size and the number of subjects — not by the occasion, the deadline, or how much detail you ask for. The table below is the same one used on every painting page, so there is no quote to wait for.
| Canvas | Metric | 1 subject | 2 subjects | 3 subjects | 4+ subjects |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 × 10 in | 20 × 25 cm | $189 | $259 | — | — |
| 12 × 16 in | 30 × 41 cm | $289 | $379 | $459 | — |
| 16 × 20 in | 41 × 51 cm | $389 | $499 | $619 | $749 |
| 20 × 24 in | 51 × 61 cm | $549 | $699 | $849 | $1,029 |
| 24 × 36 in | 61 × 91 cm | $789 | $1,059 | $1,290 | $1,560 |
| 30 × 40 in | 76 × 102 cm | $1,090 | $1,449 | $1,749 | $2,090 |
| 36 × 48 in | 91 × 122 cm | $1,390 | $1,849 | $2,249 | $2,690 |
Shipping is free worldwide. Framing is optional and quoted separately — most customers have the canvas stretched by a local framer for $60–$120.
How it works
Send the photograph
One sharp phone photo is enough. Tell us the deadline, the wall it is going on, and anything that must or must not be in the picture.
See the mock-up within 24 hours
A digital composite at the exact canvas size and crop, so size and composition are settled before any paint is bought. Nothing is charged until you approve it.
Watch it being painted
Three to five weeks in real oil, with two progress photographs. You can raise a concern at either one — that is what they are for.
Approve, then it ships
You see the finished canvas first, with one free round of adjustments. Then it travels rolled in a rigid tube, tracked and insured, with the numbered certificate inside.
Real oil, not a print
Hand-painted on cotton canvas, varnished, signed. Brushwork you can see in raking light.
You approve before we paint
A digital mock-up at the exact size and crop, within 24 hours, included in the price.
Numbered certificate
Every painting ships with a signed COA stating artist, medium, size and year.
Free worldwide shipping
Rolled in a rigid tube, tracked and insured. No minimum, no distance surcharge.
Questions
Questions we actually get
$189 for 8 × 10 in, which is the size most people choose for a single head, $289 for 12 × 16 in and $389 for 16 × 20 in. A second child or a parent holding the baby counts as an extra subject. Shipping is free worldwide and the price is fixed before you order.
Only if you send a second photograph with the eyes open, and even then we will show you the combination in the mock-up first. The shape of the lid and the amount of iris showing differ from child to child, and inventing them produces a face that is almost right, which is worse than a sleeping portrait done honestly.
Any age works, including newborn photographs taken in hospital, which are often the only ones with the whole family present. Between three and nine months the expressions are more varied and the eyes are open more often, so the painting has more to work with, but a two-week-old face is a perfectly good subject.
8 × 10 in for a head, 12 × 16 in for head and hands, and 16 × 20 in for a baby in a blanket with a parent's arm. Under 12 × 16 in the eyes start to lose the detail that makes a baby look like a particular baby rather than a baby.
Three to five weeks of painting plus three to five business days in transit; rush is three weeks including painting for $90. We cannot start before the baby arrives, so the honest sequence is photographs first, then the order. A birth announcement painting ordered in the first week lands comfortably inside two months.
Send the baby photographs
Send four or five frames, including the imperfect ones. We will tell you which carries the face, which size suits the wall and when it would arrive.