PAINTED LOVE [Austin Maternity Photographer]

I’ve been waiting to do this portrait for a long time.

For her first pregnancy, this mom and I paid homage to Whoopie Goldberg’s portrait in the bathtub of milk by Annie Leibovitz (how much more fitting can you get for a maternity portrait?) The resulting photos caught the eye of the editor of Pregnancy Magazine and were featured in a special mother’s day edition.

A while later Jen approached me with an idea for a collaboration. She is a painter and wanted to bring her special talents into her next pregnancy portrait. So when I heard she was pregnant again the brainstorming began.

Jennifer’s paintings are very organic and colorful and we wanted to bring those qualities to the portrait. We also needed a mural that would be feasible for a very pregnant woman to paint and one that could be replicated on her body easily. After a lot of back and forth we settled on this very bold and bright design.

We hung the backdrop paper a few days before the session and Jen painted the mural. As I am no painter we enlisted the aide of another very talented artist Lana Waldrep to help us. The body painting took about 2 hours and Jen was a champ through it all. Lana stood Jen near the painting and free handed a similar design on Jennifer’s body. We weren’t trying for a perfect match just a similar feel and the ways things lined up in the final photos was quite serendipitous.