Michelle Volansky

Maren’s Family Portrait

Hi guys! Long time no see! December is a crazy month for all of us, so I’ve had to re-prioritize a bit and focus on work a lot lately. I probably won’t get back in the swing of regular updates until January, but I’ll always post when I have something I want to blog about! :)

Happily, this means I’m going to have a lot of illustration work to share with you guys!

Maren contacted me about making a portrait for her quirky little family to use on her upcoming wedding materials. She wanted something similar to the one I made for Kate and I was excited to make one for her!

Maren gave tons of photo and personality reference and knew exactly what she wanted, so the sketch process was super easy! We just tweaked some colors and were ready for the final!


The more I do illustration work for clients, the more I’m learning to value and invest a lot of time into the sketching process. It can feel frustrating sometimes to work so long and hard on sketches and worry that it doesn’t show because it’s so loose looking, but the more developed a sketch is, the faster and more confidently I can work on the final piece. I struggle with finding the perfect color combinations and do a lot of reference and editing on my finals, but having that sketch to experiment with and nail down my colors and value scale really helps!

I learned a lot about fine-tuning my process and being more confident with my sketches from Kali Ciesemier. I was lucky enough to see her presentations in person, but she gives tons of awesome, valuable, interesting tips on her blog.

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