My friends recently celebrated the first birthday of their delightful grandson Fred and very kindly invited me to the party. I decided to make a portrait to commemorate the event.

Freddie is already a star on Instagram so I chose my favourite photo of him from his mum’s gallery – it has something of the sage about it – and made a series of simple pencil drawings until I was happy that the outline did the handsome little chap justice.

I then uploaded a photograph of the drawing into Photoshop, cleaned up the linework and started playing about with classic pop art parodies.

The first version was an Andy Warhol style set of four coloured squares, but I found it too busy….

so I simplified it and made the colours more muted

Then I thought I’d have a go at a version of the Obama Hope poster by Shepard Fairey

I got both versions (above and top) printed, popped them into frames and gift wrapped them; they seemed to be received rather well.

Happy birthday Freddie – you lovely boy! xx