Nursery paintings

My husbands friend came over to watch football, and asked if I wanted my first paying customer....I later decided, that with an upcoming baby shower, how nice it would be to paint them a picture as a shower gift rather then purchasing them a gift off of their registry. I always love a handmade gift. So with it in mind (that he was going to be paying me to paint them a picture) he thought he would send me some pictures of things they liked, and sent me a picture of basically this painting. It was on wood, and of course different as its a different person doing the job. So this is mostly a copy of someone else's idea, but the colors were right for their room, so I couldn't think of changing it any other way. Their room is blue and tan, so a red background was definately needed. Little Fireman, and then personalizing it - and really what other then a fireman hat could you personalize?? (I debated about what number to put on the hat, since they had no favorite number. Ideally, I'd want to put the number for the day he is born, but since that hasn't happened yet - there's not telling what day that will be, my husband - said to put '09 for the year - I wanted to do 11 since he is due in November - you can tell who won!)

Now, because I was doing a painting as a gift for that shower, and two of the moms-to-be knew eachother, I thought, well I should probably paint them both pictures. And then my other friend who is also having a baby is actually a close friend, so I decided to do paintings for them all - even though all three showers were in an 8 day period.

So the next set of nursery room paintings are based off of this nursery room bedding. I wanted to do something that didn't match it exactly, but not knowing what color she was painting her room, I decided it would be best to just paint the pictures to go with the bedding exactly. So the next four photos go together.

The next set of paintings are for a boy's monkey room, the bedding incorporated, greens, browns and blues. I personally thought the monkey in the bedding was too cutesy, so I decided against painting the monkey from the bedding. I researched different monkey images and monkey paintings, and blended a couple of styles together.

The background of this painting, is a copy of a another painting/print - with the only real difference being the color of the vines - It need some blue. The monkey image in the original print I was borrowing from had a lifelike looking monkey, and I had found a photo of a real mother monkey kissing her baby monkey on the head, and thought it would be cute to make a cartoon version of the two for this painting.

This painting, I also borrowed from another print, of a monkey looking up at a banana hanging from a string. The background colors are different, and the monkey is a little different too - of course I wanted these two pictures to work together as they were going in the same room. And since the other painting had only a little amount of blue, I thought it would be nice to make the background of this one blue and add the leaves as well.

After painting the above painting, I was looking at the plain blue bottom, and I thought, how cute would it be to paint his tongue sticking out for daring to look at the bottom. I think it gives a cute and humorous touch.