I painted this lovely family portrait of Ann-Marie and her husband Eugene with their lovely son Henry in July this year. They took a family trip to Carvoeiro in the Algarve in southern Portugal earlier in 2025. Eugene was celebrating his 40th birhtday and Ann-Marie, my client, wanted to gift him something significant and special for such a milestone celebration.
A few years ago she commissioned a painting of Eugene’s father as a wedding gift on their wedding day back in 2018.
He was very happy with it so she got an idea to have me paint another portrait. This time it was of Eugene and his family now including young Henry, who is the cutest boy. He was very happy with the painting himself when he and Ann-Marie collected it from me before Eugene’s birthday celebration.
Ann-Marie had a lot of photographs from their holiday in Carvoeiro but had one in particular in mind. I did have a good few amendments to make however. This included removing their sunglasses and amending some of their faces. It was challenging for me especially that the photo is backlit but I managed at the end.
Ann-Marie was very happy with the finished painting:
Hi Ivana! Absolutely gorgeous!! That is absolute perfection Ivana ?? thank you!! Can’t wait to see it, perfect!
Ann-Marie about the finished painting of her and her family she commissioned in July 2025
The painting is 30 x 30 cm in size and I used acrylic paints on fine grain stretched canvas. I visited Carvoeiro before myself and I wanted to capture the beautiful colours of that part of the world. The colour palette is so different to the Irish one. It is much brighter, shadows are much deeper and highlights much lighter. This results in a great harmony of contrasts.
I worked on a stretched canvas with a thin profile of 18mm. I started with a yellow ochre line sketch with a round brush. I wanted to carefully capture the likeness of the characters, their clothes and the background scenery. Once I was happy with the sketch, I started putting down some basic colours. This took some time. I covered the entire surface before moving to adding details to the entire scene. I then went over the family’s faces with smaller brushes. With the extra layer of detail on their faces, they become the focus of the image.
The canvas was quite small for the amount of detail required which forced me to use smaller round brushes especially when finishing off the painting. There was some interesting light falling on the hair and through onto their foreheads. I had a great time capturing this on canvas.
