People Portrait – “Cherry Social”

This is an oil portrait painting of my daughter at her ‘cherry social’ when she was about three, feeding cherries to her stuffed Teddy Bear.

Every year the National Cherry Festival in Traverse City, MI has a competition for artists to get their work on the official poster for the year. This didn’t win, but I like it best anyway.

I had to “pose” a lot of things to get to this finished portrait, including taking the quilt off the bed and spreading it out on the grass. The grass is rather loose and stylized with most of the detail concentrated on the subjects. Basically, a lot of different elements had to be added together from a lot of reference photos to construct the cherry social final painting.

Oil on Board

Size: 17″ x 23″