An English dad’s hilariously bad portraits have gone viral and now he’s receiving commissions for his works worldwide.
Jamie Lee Matthias’s whacky side hustle started by accident after he painted a terrible portrait of his wife Kate as a wedding gift.
Jamie Matthias painting from family photograph – via SWNSKate thought the artwork was so funny she posted a picture of it on social media and within days it racked up thousands of views and comments.
41-year-old Matthias has since been inundated with requests from people desperate for him to create funny versions of their own photographs.
“I actually don’t mean to paint badly and I’m doing my best to recreate the photos I get sent but it’s just the way they turn out,” he said, explaining that he, his wife, and their three kids have always painted. “It’s like a family activity. Kate was making a comment about how bad mine were and I said I would paint one for our wedding day, as a joke.”
“For me it’s just about the reactions and people have been loving it,” he said.
Matthias says he tries “to create an alternate universe where proportions have no meaning,” and never outrightly considered them as bad until people started telling him.
The painting he made for his wedding day was brought out by the kids, and the audience loved it, leading Matthias to get the idea of doing some over Christmas of family and friends.
– SWNS“The reactions were priceless. I thought I’d stick one out there and see if anyone wanted one,” he explained to the English news media outlet, SWNS. He was stunned by the reaction.
“As a bit of a joke set up a… Instagram account called Terrible Art by Jamie Lee. We sent out the picture, the reaction, and a bit of a blurb and it just kind of blew up.”
“We’ve got orders all over England, Scotland, Wales, and even Northern Ireland, people all over the country seem to be really enjoying it. We’re at 71 orders now, and we put it up on January 2!” he said.
Best of all, his customers are totally getting into the joke, with the owner of the following portrait praising the “attention to detail.”
Each picture is acrylic on canvas and priced at £25 plus postage, which has led to a fairly sizeable demand which Matthias now balances with his job as an accountant.
“I’ve been drawing this way since I was a child, if anything some of the paintings have got a lot worse,” he said, adding that “there’s no risk of it getting better.”