I love the story behind how I first came to work with Emily Li.

Way back in November, 2024, I drew Sunny, the second traveling photo model I hired for sketching. Sunny was super supportive and understanding of my quite limited drawing skills at the time, and mentioned that she’d love for me to sketch her good friend, Emily, who she often poses with.

Almost a year later, I decided to take a trip to Switzerland as a vacation and to host Gracie, another model that I love drawing. I knew Gracie would be working for most of the trip so she may not have much time to pose for me and I considered looking for local models I could draw.

I did a search on Model Mayhem, though, to be quite honest, I was not very optimistic about finding anyone. Previously in 2025, I had visited Prague and found that I very much prefer to work with models who have agreed to work with me due to the recommendation of someone else who I’ve drawn, but I thought I’d just have a look.

Emily was the only model who caught my attention. As I looked through her portfolio, I saw her posing with another woman, and suddenly realized, “That’s Sunny!”

Then I remembered that Sunny, while Russian speaking, lives in Switzerland. Instead of contacting Emily, I wrote Sunny to let her know I would be in Switzerland and would love to draw her again. It turned out she was just returning from a trip on my last day, and we agreed to meet. As I had hoped, she mentioned that Emily would like to meet and perhaps pose as well.

Yay!

I only confessed that I had seen Emily’s Model Mayhem profile and was interested in her after I had finished drawing her, and my intuition about her was very accurate! She was so much fun to draw!

After my first sketch of Sunny, we all agreed to draw the two of them together for the last two sketches.

I hope that I get to draw them each, both separately and together, many times more.