Maura Amato

Front St. House, 2026. 7 x 5 inches, gouache and pen on paper.

Orchard House, 2026. 10 x 8 inches. Gouache and pen on paper.

Did you know that NW Ohio is the warbler capital of the WORLD? This blows my mind! I recently read in a birding book that there are around 36 different kinds passing through Magee Marsh this spring.

There weren't any photos of the way this house was 30+ years ago, so we went off of memories and modified from real estate listing photos-- Modified the landscaping, changed the color of the door and shutters, added in the porch furniture, restored the basketball hoop (it's still there today!) back to its original glory!

My "birds of ohio" print can be left black and white, or you can use it as a little passport of sorts to keep track of the birds you see by coloring them in!

It's bird migration season in Ohio! Bird prints for sale in my etsy shop

Christmas is my favorite holiday, so this project had me nerding out over all of the holiday cheer I could illustrate! A quick sketch helped us confirm the concept, and a reference photo of the Huntington Center helped me construct a more defined layout. I always start with a colored pencil mockup and then a painted / numbered diagram that comes with me to the event. This had a lot of teeny tiny detailed shapes to paint, so it was pretty cool to see how much was completed during the game. It is up to the auction winner to finish it off now!

Pburg House, 2025. 10 x 8 inches. Gouache and pen on paper.

East Toledo House, 2025. 8 x 10 inches, gouache and pen on paper. An encore painting of this special house for the people who grew up in it!

RI House, 2025. 8 x 10 inches, gouache and pen on paper.

This was my trickiest project of the fall-- A house that was lived in 30+ years ago that had several changes to the landscaping. Without images from when they lived there, we used real estate websites and Google Maps to piece things together. The garage had sentimental value, but Google Street View only offered grainy photos from 2007 for this particular house. I used 2 point perspective and notes from the person who lived there to piece together the way it used to look.

Rudolph House, 2025. 19 x 13 inches. Gouache and pen on paper.

I really enjoy painting, but outlining in pen at the end is my favorite part. As you can see from the two painted photos, pen really makes it pop!

Harp House, 2025. Four 7 x 5 inch paintings, gouache and pen on paper. I forgot to take pictures of the finished product, but here's a behind the scenes look at how we pieced together the original look of the house as the Harp siblings remember it! We went back and forth on sizes of shrubs, trees that used to be in the landscaping, etc. Sometimes having a photo even that is intended to be of people can help me see the colors and details well on the architecture of a house!

Graham House, 2025. 10 x 8 inches. Gouache and pen on paper.

This illustration was pieced together from photos in tripadvisor, yelp, and other random spots on the internet. Not only were there very few images online from before the fire, but it also had been remodeled and looked very different than when the bar first opened. I enjoy helping them piece together the original look through the photos we found <3

The Mudhens and Walleyes have some of the coolest themes for their games, and this one did not disappoint! We started out with two loose sketch ideas and narrowed it down to a coloring page of Spike and Cattrick surrounded by hockey gear. A neighbor let me borrow their hockey gear so I could set up a reference photo for my black and white drawing. Once I had the black and white illustration painted on, I mocked up colors to make a diagram and color key for the paint by number activitiy at the game. Primarily kids worked on this one-- It was so much fun!