Lots of people buy Diptyque products as gifts for their friends, families and loved ones. As part of the newly launched L’Eau Papier line, I was honoured to provide live portrait painting for the customers as a complimentary gift at Holt Renfrew Yorkdale, Toronto. The style of this portrait painting mimics the inky water blobs from the L’Eau Papier label.

As an illustrator, there’s always challenges when it comes to painting portraits. Most of the time the person I am painting is not present as the portraits would be a gift or it’s from a phone order the sales associate received so I would be given reference pictures. Sometimes they’re blurry. Sometimes they have odd angles. Sometimes the quality is low. Sometimes they’re too zoomed out. Sometimes they want 2 faces from 2 different pictures to be painted on 1 page.

So I work with what we have and I think it went super well. I was still able to capture the important features of the faces on the finished painting. All done within 15 minutes in letter size paper. As an added touch, I wrote names/messages in calligraphy by request to make it even more special.

Here are some examples: