Cream Puff, Cherry Pie, and Chocolate Cake: Alex's Commission Story

I've been holding onto this commission for a few weeks, waiting to share it and I'm so excited you get to see it now!

It's a wedding gift from one spouse to the other and it captures all of the food-themed nick names they've used for each other over the years!

It was such a special piece for me to get to create and I wish Alex and Dan all the happiness in the world in this new chapter together!

Scroll down to take a look at the painting process.

It all starts with an idea and sketch!

Once the final version of the sketch is approved, I create the outline for the final piece

Next I fill in the color blocks using vibrant saturated colors to help the whole piece to pop and have a warm glow

Then each part of the painting get painted in detail

Until each piece can shine on its own!

Finally I added the background to pull it all together.

I love painting commissions because I get to hear about the small ways that a shared love of food can make a relationship and a home a warmer place.

What are the special ways that food brings your family or relationships together?

I am still taking holiday commissions for this season, but I have limited spots available.

If you'd like to explore the idea of a commissioned painting, check out my different offerings by CLICKING HERE!

With love,
Laurel

My Hawaiian Family Vacation and My Brand New Milkshake Painting

I hope you’ve been having a great week so far. I was in Hawaii last week with my family and wanted to share some photos from my trip!

My paintings are entirely inspired by my nostalgic food memories made with my family so it was so great to have a whole week of relaxing, catching up with my immediate family and cousins, and doing what we do best: searching for the next thing to eat together. 

I wasn't originally planning to go on this trip, but once my dad called and told me he was planning on surprising my mom with a vow renewal ceremony on the beach to celebrate their 30th anniversary, I couldn’t not go!

We shared a rental house on the north shore of Oahu with my cousins and their adorable and hilarious kids. We went on food adventures: to the Dole Pineapple Plantation for Dole Whip! To Giovanni’s Shrimp Truck for scampi peel and eat shrimp! To a tiny roadside bakery for malasadas! And to Honolulu for Opal Thai! And we enjoyed amazing home cooked meals made by my cousin Simon. 

All in all it was worth every minute of the 12 hour plane ride. Since I’ve been back, I’ve been back in my little studio updating one of my favorite paintings: MY GIANT MILKSHAKE! It needed some more highlights and color and that’s exactly what it got. I love how it turned out!
 

I’ve always loved a good chocolate milkshake. 
CLICK HERE to find out which three iconic milkshakes inspired this painting!

Is my milkshake the piece of art your home has been waiting for? It's 12" x 36" and is ready to hang. Like all of my paintings, it's acrylic on canvas. It's $650 and ships for free from Boston.
CLICK HERE to claim it!

Long Island Vineyards, Brownie Extravaganza, and a Lobster Boil!

 I hope you've been having a great summer so far and that you've been able to make time for the summer activities you waited all winter for! I know for myself, summer weekends fill up so quickly and the time just flies.

Last week I was in Southold on the North Fork of Long Island with Jeff's family for a weeklong vacation we'd been looking forward to for months. We spent the week eating, hanging out at the beach, eating, vineyard hopping, eating, cooking, playing scrabble, and eating. It was great!

Obviously my personal favorite parts of the trip centered around the table. It's impossible to choose my favorite thing that I ate or did all week but if I had to choose, my top three would be...

1. Wine Tasting! I don't even remember how many we visited. At least five? Six? We discovered that Long Island makes a pretty good Sauvignon Blanc and brought back a few bottles from Bedell, which we visited more than once...

2. Making Brownie Extravaganza for Jeff's family! What the heck is Brownie Extravaganza, you ask? It's basically a brownie trifle with cool whip and pudding and it's been my mom's go-to dessert for as long as I can remember. I had never made it for Jeff's family before and I loved being able to share one of my nostalgic family recipes with them.

3. Backyard lobster fest! My childhood was spent land-locked in Atlanta so seafood boils and get-your-hands-dirty lobster dinners weren't part of my typical summer growing up. Seeing as Jeff's family is from Rhode Island, they're kind of lobster pros. This was my favorite meal of the whole trip, despite the mosquitoes that attacked the table toward the end of dinner. There's just something so fun about cracking the shells and dunking a hunk of fresh lobster in butter. I'm drooling just thinking about it!

All in all it was an awesome trip. I got to make some new memories around the table with Jeff's family, I got to share one of my favorite family recipes with them, and I got to drink a lot of wine. If that doesn't sound like a successful summer then I don't know what does!

Have you made new family memories around the table this summer? Or eaten anything that blew you away?

P.S. I'm always channeling my food memories into new artwork. Click here to shop available prints!

P.P.S. I'd love to capture your most treasured food memories. Click here to learn about my commission packages!

DIY Day at Sowa: My First Ice Cream Painting Workshop!

I'm a few days late on National Ice Cream Day (depending on whose food holiday calendar you're looking at), but I wanted to share the Ice Cream Painting Workshop I led at the Sowa Open Market a couple weeks ago.
 

We had so much fun and every single person who came made a beautiful painting to hang in their home. There was a great mix of people who were avid painters and others who had never picked up a paint brush before. And now all of them have brand new kitchen art.

It was so great that I've been invited to lead another Ice Cream Painting Workshop on September 16th! Tickets are available now!

Check out everyone's paintings below!

Want to join me for the next workshop on September 16th? RSVP Below!

Your New Favorite Food Magazine and a Dose of Ice Cream Truck Nostalgia

Since it's still National Ice Cream month, I wanted to share a beautiful essay with you written by my best friend Rachel. It's a moving and wonderfully written piece about the nostalgia of running for the ice cream truck with her mom in New York City. It is also one of the feature stories in the very first issue of GRLSQUASH, a biannual women’s food, culture, and art journal. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

My illustration for Rachel's piece

Nancy Pappas' Illustration for GRLSQUASH

This Was Us
by Rachel DeSimone

“This was us,” she said as she handed me a comic that she had cut out of the paper and saved for me, un-creased like it had come from today’s paper but she had kept it for weeks. When I took it from my mom’s cracked and bloodied fingers I had already begun to put crinkles on the edges that she had kept straight. “Put it on your refrigerator,” she said. “I have one up on our fridge from the same comic.” That day we sat together in my parents’ bed for eight hours.

My mom has taken to reading the newspaper again since most of her time is spent in bed. When I was little she would get The New York Times on the weekends and not have time to read it so it would pile up until she would sit herself down one day with a giant stack and go through it all. That was too overwhelming. Now she gets The Daily News, which is much more manageable. Every day she sends me a text message with my horoscope from the paper. “This lady is really good,” she always says. I wait for the text to appear with capital letters “YOUR HORISCOPE!!!!” and tons of the red exclamation point emojis that no one uses because they are on the last page.

As I looked at the simple comic, a little boy and his dog, called “Red & Rover,” I didn’t quite see what she meant. The first frame of the comic showed the little boy and the dog sitting on the curb, the boy’s hand to his own ear and the dog’s ear standing at attention. In the corner of the box were musical notes. The next frame showed two clouds racing in the direction of the music (which must have been coming from an ice cream truck) and then the boy and dog strolling back both licking popsicles. As my mom watched my eyes finish scanning the paper she repeated, “that was us.” I stopped for a second, looked to the right, towards her bedroom window and it hit me... READ THE REST

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I also want to introduce you to Madison Trapkin, founder of GRLSQUASH!

In her own words, GRLSQUASH is the "biannual women’s food, culture, and art journal self-published out of Cambridge, MA. Our mission is to highlight the overlaps of these worlds with words, images, and recipes from our contributors. Food is the common thread connecting the GRLSQUASH community and we believe it’s the GRLs we need to shout about the most."

Madison asked Rachel and me to become the copy editor and visual editor respectively and we both are SO excited to be a part of such an amazing project. I also got to contribute some of my food paintings and illustrations too! The drawings of my and my boyfriend's grandmothers and the painting of my mom that hangs in my kitchen are printed in this issue, which is so special to me!

GRLSQUASH Issue 1: MOTHERS/FOREMOTHERS
is available now for preorder!!

This journal captures every single thing I love about food, nostalgia, and relationships and I know you'll love it too!

As an added bonus, if you email me a screen shot of your preorder confirmation email, I will send you a FREE mini print of an illustration I created just for GRLSQUASH!

With love,
Laurel

P.S. Make sure you're following GRLSQUASH on Instagram @GRLSQUASH for daily inspiration!