My wife’s birthday fell on the day after Mother’s Day this year, so I knew I had to come up with a nice gift to celebrate both days, and on a budget. So when you tell an artist that they’re not allowed to spend any money on you, you pretty much know you’re going to end up with a painting for a gift. I’ve been wanting to paint our daughter ever since she was born, so this seemed the perfect time to do so.

The gift ended up late because the week I started this, we ended up being evacuated due to a wildfire that came within blocks of our home. Being the procrastinator that I am, this was of course the week before Mother’s Day itself, so I was already pushing it to begin with. I finally finished the piece and my ever-patient wife thankfully found it to be worth the wait. Now that it’s been varnished and photographed, I can finally share it with all of you!

Above is the initial thumbnail sketch on a Post-It, where I came up with the basic idea, followed by the final tight sketch. You may notice that while I drew angel wings on the initial sketch, I wisely realized that would perhaps be a bit much and dropped them from the final.

Above is the final tight sketch. I drew the lines and circles in Photoshop to make sure they were nice and perfectly geometric, printed the sketch out in reverse on a laser printer, and then placed the print face down on the canvas and went over the back of it with a Chartpak blender marker. This transfers the toner down onto the panel, leaving me with the sketch facing the right side up, and more importantly, saving me the effort of tracing over my lines as I usually do when I coat the back of my sketches with charcoal. I’ll continue to tinker with this particular method of transferring my sketches, as the toner transfers on very dark, and tends to come up a bit through some of the thinner layers of paint.

Eagle-eyed viewers might notice a few differences between the sketch and the final, most notably the hair. When I first started this piece, I was already working from reference that was a couple of months old. By the time I got around to finishing the piece, Natalie’s hair had grown significantly longer as well as becoming lighter. They really do grow up fast.