Talent Is Such A Gift!

I introduced my brother-in-law a couple years ago, and told you about the above picture. But while I was browsing through my photos this morning wondering what to talk to you all about, I came across these.
Mike has done caricature parties in the past and one year did their Christmas card picture, above. That's Mike, my sister and at the time their two kids. They've have lots more since.

Below is Robb and I, and at the time, just Ryan. And yes, his eyes really WERE that big! Mike just exaggerated the small size of his butt and my hair...


Mike has done other art work too, not just caricatures. He did an oil painting of my sister-in-law and her husband from one of their wedding photos. He took a big family picture that my parents gave him and did an artists rendition of that, and included people who weren't at the event... Kind of like photo-shopping someone in later... I thought I had that picture scanned in, but I don't.The above picture was our Christmas letter photo for 2010. We could NOT get the kids all together for a single picture. So we had Mike do it from various pictures of each of them.

He's done a picture of Paul at the gate Beautiful for my mother-in-law and for all the characters in the picture, replaced the faces with people she loves from her family.

Let's see... What else? He's done murals on building walls in his home town, bible story cartoon type books. He used to have a paper mache KISS life sized figure in their home as well as a very busty super hero woman, but either packed those away as the kids got older or sold them. The KISS one was so realistic, it was disturbing.

Currently he's going to school online learning how to do graphics animation. He's about 3/4 of the way through and doing really well. He hopes to be able to work for PIXAR someday. Wouldn't that be cool?!

Or be involved with the next Heavy Metal sequel.

Either way, I know where I can get my next Christmas card pic!

Drop me a note if you want their email address.