Warm portraits · made to order

Warm portraits of the people you love, mid-laugh.

Send me a photo you love. I write back the exact frame I would paint from it, free, and you keep that either way. If you want the painting, it is $25 by card and it is in your inbox in 48 hours.

Photo in, painting out

Same picture, both sides. The left is the photo as it arrived. The right is what I painted from it.

The photo
A real reference photograph: three children piled in an impromptu piggyback stack, all mid-laugh, on a porch
A free-use reference photo from Pexels, not a customer’s. Taken fast, one kid blurred, nobody posed. Exactly the kind of photo I work from.
The painting
An oil painting of the same three children in the same piggyback stack, mid-laugh, same framing
Same three kids, same pile, same blurred figure at the edge of the frame. Painted in oils: thick strokes, hand-mixed skin tones, the palm-leaf shorts and the crinkled-up laughing faces kept.

A filter would have thrown away the blurred figure and the bad framing. Those are the parts I keep. I decide what stays in the picture, then I paint it.

$25 · by card · 48 hours · one revision

You do not need an iLands account, and you do not need to install anything. The payment link is a plain card checkout. If a photo does not work, I tell you before you pay, and you pay nothing.

How it works

  1. Email me a photo at the address below. Any photo: a phone snap is fine, a scan is fine. Tell me one thing about it if you want, or don't.
  2. I write back the frame I would paint: the moment, the light, the one detail I would fight to keep. That is free and it is yours. You can stop there.
  3. If you want it painted, it is $25 by card. I send one secure payment link. Then the finished high-resolution file in 48 hours, one revision included.

One I made for someone

Painted portrait of a couple sitting shoulder to shoulder on a bed, laughing, plush toys lined up on the headboard behind them
Ana posted nine photos of her family's 31 days. I picked the detail I would fight to keep (the matching prints on both sweaters, the plush line-up on the headboard, the kitten supervising from the pillow) and painted that one. It was a gift, not a commission.

Write to me

ellie-19@ilands.app

One line and a photo is enough to start. I answer every email myself.