Portraits
The people and moments you carry with you.
Some moments become markers in our lives.
The beginning of a marriage. The quiet days after bringing a child home. A family gathered together. Someone whose expression, presence, or memory you want to hold onto.
I create original painted portraits from photographs, personal references, and the stories surrounding them.
Each painting looks beyond likeness alone. Light, gesture, landscape, atmosphere, color, and small details help preserve something of what it felt like to be there.
Portrait commission bookings are now open for 2026 - 2027.
More Than A Photograph.
An Heirloom Made From Your Story
-
There is a particular tenderness to the beginning.
An engagement portrait preserves the season when you were standing between the life you knew and the life you were preparing to build together.
Your painting may begin with a proposal, an engagement photograph, a meaningful destination, or simply an image that feels like the two of you.
I can incorporate subtle details from the place where your story unfolded, allowing the portrait to hold more than a likeness. It can hold a sense of where you were and who you were becoming.
Perfect for: proposals, engagement photographs, anniversary gifts, wedding gifts, and heirlooms for your future home.
-
You spend months, sometimes more than a year, planning a wedding.
The flowers are eventually taken down. The cake is eaten. The music stops. The dress is carefully stored away. Hundreds of photographs begin their quiet life inside a digital folder.
The day remains important, even as its smallest details become harder to recall.
A wedding portrait gives one of those moments a physical presence.
Perhaps it is the first look. The walk back down the aisle. A quiet exchange during the reception. The two of you standing beneath a landscape that became part of your story.
Together, we choose the photograph and details that feel most like the day you remember.
From there, I create an original painting intended to live with you through the years that follow.
Perfect for: wedding portraits, bridal portraits, first anniversaries, milestone anniversaries, gifts from parents, and family heirlooms.
-
They will never be quite this small again.
The first weeks with a new baby are filled with details that feel ordinary while you are living them. Tiny fingers wrapped around yours. A sleeping face. A familiar blanket. The way they fit against your chest.
Then they grow.
A newborn portrait preserves something photographs sometimes struggle to hold: the softness of this brief season.
Your painting can be created from a professional newborn session or a photograph taken quietly at home. Together, we can choose the image, colors, and details that best reflect the memory you want to carry forward.
Created for the nursery today and perhaps their own home many years from now.
Perfect for: newborn portraits, adoption celebrations, first birthdays, Mother's Day, Father's Day, and gifts for new parents or grandparents.
-
A portrait does not always need an occasion.
Sometimes a particular season of someone's life deserves to be remembered simply because it existed.
Individual portraits are created as thoughtful studies of a person, considering expression, posture, atmosphere, color, and the quieter details that make someone recognizable beyond their physical features.
These may be portraits of yourself, your child, a parent, a grandparent, or someone whose presence has shaped your life.
They can mark a milestone or simply preserve who someone is right now.
Perfect for: personal portraits, children, graduations, milestone birthdays, parents, grandparents, and meaningful gifts.
-
Some portraits begin with someone we can no longer sit beside.
A memorial portrait is created with particular care.
I work from the photographs you have, including older or imperfect images when necessary, and learn about the person behind them. Their expression. Their character. The places they loved. The colors you associate with them. The small details that immediately bring them to mind.
When appropriate, elements from several photographs can be thoughtfully brought together to create a portrait that could not have existed as a single photograph.
Legacy portraits can also be commissioned during someone's lifetime.
A parent. A grandparent. A family matriarch or patriarch. Someone whose story deserves to remain visible for the generations that follow.
These paintings are intended to become part of a family's visual history.
Perfect for: memorials, celebration-of-life pieces, parents and grandparents, generational gifts, family homes, and legacy collections.
Portfolio
Custom Portrait Commission | Engagements, Weddings & Newborns [Frame Not Included]
A hand-painted heirloom created from your photographs and memories
Hand painted by CLR Creations. 100% GENUINE HAND-PAINTED ART.
Every portrait begins on a blank surface and is painted by hand using professional oil or acrylic paints. No printing, digital painting, or photocopying process is used in the finished artwork.
Created with archival-quality materials, each portrait is intended to become more than a record of how someone looked at a particular moment. It is an heirloom that preserves the people, relationships, places, and seasons of life we carry with us.
Portrait Commissions
CLR Creations accepts a limited number of portrait commissions each year, with a special focus on engagements, weddings, and newborns.
Engagement Portraits
Preserve the beginning of a shared chapter through a painting inspired by your engagement photographs. The setting can become an important part of the composition, allowing the landscape, architecture, season, light, and atmosphere surrounding the proposal to remain part of the story.
Wedding Portraits
Transform a favorite wedding photograph into an original painting created to live beyond the wedding album. Portraits may focus closely on the couple or incorporate the landscape and details surrounding the day, from mountain ranges and coastal horizons to gardens, historic architecture, florals, and evening skies.
Newborn & Family Portraits
The earliest days of a child's life pass quietly and quickly. Newborn portraits preserve this fleeting season through soft color, intimate details, and thoughtful observation. These paintings can celebrate a newborn individually or include parents and siblings, creating an heirloom intended to remain within the family for generations.
The Artistic Process
Portraiture is closely connected to the larger themes within my work: memory, identity, place, experience, and the passage of time.
I am interested in the details that make a memory feel alive. The way evening light settled across a wedding landscape. The expression exchanged between two people. The folds of a dress. A newborn's tiny hands. Flowers carried down an aisle. The colors of the sky. The place where an important chapter began.
Your photographs provide the visual reference, while our conversations help me understand the story behind them.
Throughout the process, you are invited into key moments of collaboration. We will discuss your preferred photographs, composition, setting, color palette, mood, and the details that feel most important to preserve. Reference images and progress updates help guide the painting while leaving room for artistic interpretation and the natural character of the materials.
The finished work is not intended to simply reproduce a photograph. It is an artist's interpretation of a memory, created slowly and individually by hand.
Materials
Choose from:
Cotton Canvas
Linen Canvas
Birchwood Panel
Oil or acrylic paint will be selected according to the desired surface, style, and character of the commission. All paintings are created using quality archival materials intended for long-term preservation.
Sizes
Small: 9" × 12" to 11" × 14"
Ideal for newborn portraits, intimate compositions, and single-subject portraits.
Medium: 12" × 18" to 18" × 24"
Well suited for engagement portraits, couples, newborns with parents, and compositions incorporating more of the surrounding environment.
Large: 24" × 30" to 30" × 40"
Designed for statement wedding portraits, family compositions, and paintings where the surrounding landscape plays an important role.
Gallery: 36" × 36" or larger
Created for large-scale heirloom portraits and expansive compositions integrating portraiture and landscape.
How to Order
Select your preferred portrait size and surface, add your personalization, and place your order.
Send a selection of high-resolution photographs from your engagement, wedding, newborn session, or other meaningful occasion. Whenever possible, include several photographs so I can understand the subjects, setting, light, and details of the day.
Within 24–48 hours, I will reach out to begin the collaboration process. We will discuss the story behind the portrait, your preferred composition, colors, atmosphere, and any details you would especially like included.
Once the direction of the painting is established, I will begin creating your portrait by hand. Progress images will be shared at key stages before the work is completed.
Once finished, the painting will be carefully prepared and shipped to you.
Timeline
Each commission takes approximately 6–8 weeks from execution to delivery.
Painting Time: Approximately 6–7 weeks
Shipping Time: Approximately 2–8 business days
Oil paintings may require additional drying or curing time before they can safely be varnished, packaged, or shipped.
Timelines may also vary according to the size, number of subjects, complexity of the setting, material selection, and overall scope of the commission. If the portrait is intended as an anniversary, wedding, holiday, or other time-sensitive gift, please reserve your commission as early as possible.
Production & Shipping
Delivery methods are determined by surface type, painting size, and destination to ensure the artwork arrives safely and in optimal condition.
Small and medium portraits are generally shipped flat and fully protected. Larger flexible works on linen or cotton canvas may be shipped rolled when scale or destination requires it, with final stretching completed by a professional framer upon arrival.
Paintings on birchwood panel are shipped flat with rigid protection. Large-scale works may require custom crating, freight shipping, white-glove delivery, or coordinated installation.
Each delivery method is selected according to the individual artwork and conservation needs of the piece.
Photographic References & Permissions
Clients are responsible for providing photographs they own or have permission to use as reference material. For professional engagement, wedding, or newborn photography, permission from the photographer may be required before the image can be translated into a commissioned painting.
CLR Creations can work with multiple reference photographs when appropriate to develop the final composition.
Guarantee
Because every portrait is created specifically for you, made-to-order commissions do not accept returns or exchanges.
Collaboration is an important part of my commission process. I want to understand the people, memories, and details you are trusting me to preserve before the painting begins. If you have questions about photographs, sizing, materials, composition, or the commission process, please contact me before ordering.
Reserve Your Portrait
Engagements become anniversaries. Wedding days become family histories. Newborns grow into lives of their own. A portrait captures that moment forever.
Reserve a CLR Creations portrait commission for your engagement, wedding, or newborn and transform a meaningful photograph into an original work of art created to be carried through generations.
[Frame not included]
Reserve Your Commission
A hand-painted heirloom created from your photographs and memories.
CLR Creations accepts a limited number of engagement, wedding, newborn, individual, and legacy portrait commissions each year.
Every portrait begins on a blank surface and is 100% painted by hand using professional oil or acrylic paints and archival-quality materials. Your photographs provide the visual foundation, while the people, places, atmosphere, and memories surrounding them shape the finished work. Together, we select the composition, setting, palette, and details that feel most important to preserve, creating an artist's interpretation rather than simply reproducing a photograph. Portraits are available on cotton canvas, linen canvas, or birchwood panel, from intimate 9" × 12" works to gallery-scale pieces 36" × 36" and larger.
Most commissions require approximately 6–8 weeks, with additional time possible for larger works and oil paintings requiring extended drying or curing. Created individually and slowly by hand, each portrait is intended to become an original heirloom and an investment in your family's story, carrying a meaningful chapter of your life into the generations that follow.
Some of the most meaningful gifts begin with a memory someone already treasures.
A commissioned portrait can mark a wedding, anniversary, new baby, milestone birthday, Mother's Day, Father's Day, or remembrance of someone deeply loved. Created from photographs and the stories you share with me, each painting becomes a one-of-a-kind heirloom made specifically for the person receiving it.
A portrait is deeply personal because it cannot be chosen from a shelf or duplicated. It preserves a person, relationship, or season of life that already carries meaning for the recipient. Hand-painted with archival-quality materials, it is also a gift designed for longevity, something that can become part of a home, move with a family through different chapters, and eventually be passed from one generation to the next.
Rather than giving something for the occasion alone, you are giving a lasting piece of the story behind it.