How to photograph your pet for a portrait
We commissioned five test portraits before opening, from five ordinary photographs. Four came back looking unmistakably like the animal. One did not — and the reason it failed is the single most useful thing we can tell you before you send us a picture.
It is almost always the ears
The portrait that missed was a black long-haired mixed breed, photographed outdoors on an overcast afternoon. The coat came through beautifully — every strand of fur, the white patch on his chest in exactly the right place. What went wrong was the ears.
His ears are thick and semi-erect and fold forward at the tips. The portrait gave him tall, pointed, fully upright shepherd ears. Handsome. Wrong dog.
We would not have caught it from the photograph alone. It was taken from about four metres away, and at that distance his ears are perhaps forty pixels tall. There simply was not enough information in the image, so the ears got filled in with something plausible instead of something true.
Ear carriage is the first thing an owner reads on their own animal. Nobody looks at a portrait of their dog and checks the paws. They look at the face, and the ears are most of the face’s character.
So: whatever else you do, send a photograph where the ears are clearly visible. A slightly worse picture with clear ears beats a beautiful one taken from across the garden, every single time.
Get closer than feels natural
Head and shoulders. Not the whole animal, not the animal in a landscape, not the animal being adorable next to the sofa. We are painting a bust portrait — everything below the chest gets replaced with velvet and lace anyway.
If you find yourself thinking “you can see him fine”, take three steps forward and take another one.
Window light beats everything
Not the flash. Not the overhead bulb. A window, in the daytime, with your pet facing it or turned slightly away from it.
Flash flattens the face and kills the texture in fur, which is exactly the thing an oil portrait is made of. Overhead light drops the eyes into shadow. A window gives you soft, directional light that describes the shape of the head — which is what we need in order to paint it.
That said: one of the five test photographs was taken outside at night, lit by a headlamp, and it produced one of the best portraits of the set. So this is a preference, not a rule. Send what you have.
Shoot at their eye level
Standing over your dog and shooting down gives you a portrait of the top of a head. Crouch. Sit on the floor. Put the phone on the carpet if you have to.
This one is worth the small indignity — it changes the whole character of the result, because portraits painted from eye level read as dignified and portraits shot from above read as a snapshot.
Ignore the background entirely
It gets replaced with a seventeenth-century interior. The bins can be in shot. The washing can be on the airer. One of our test photographs has a man in blue overalls and a coil of fencing wire in it, and none of that survived into the painting.
Do not tidy up. Do not go somewhere scenic. Spend the effort on the ears instead.
If your animal is black
Black coats are genuinely the hard case, and it is worth knowing that going in.
The problem is not that the portrait comes out dark. It is that a dark coat photographed in flat light has almost no visible structure — the whole head reads as one shape, and the details that make your dog your dog are simply not recorded in the file.
The fix is light from the side. Turn them so a window is off to one side rather than behind you, and the light will describe the muzzle, the brow and the ears instead of flattening them. Two or three attempts is normal.
If you are not sure whether yours is good enough, send it anyway and ask. We would rather tell you before we start than guess and hope you accept the result.
Two things we cannot work from
A photograph with someone’s face in it. Hands and arms are fine — one of our test portraits was made from a picture with a hand under the puppy’s chin, and the hand simply is not there in the painting. But a visible human face is a line we do not cross without that person’s consent, so we will ask you for a different picture.
A photograph you do not have the rights to. Your own pictures, or pictures taken by someone who is happy for you to use them. Not a breeder’s marketing photo, not something saved off the internet.
If this is a memorial
Send the best picture you have, even if it is a bad one. Especially if it is a bad one.
Most people in this situation are working from whatever happened to be on their phone, taken without any idea it would be the last. We know that, and we do not need a good photograph to try. Tell us it is a memorial piece when you order and we will take as many attempts as it needs, at no cost, for as long as it takes.
The short version
- Ears clearly visible. This matters more than everything else combined.
- Head and shoulders, closer than feels natural.
- Daylight from a window. No flash.
- Down at their eye level.
- Background is irrelevant — it gets replaced.
- Dark coat? Light from the side, and take a few.
- No people’s faces in the frame.
And if you are unsure, send it and ask. Nothing is printed until you have seen the artwork and approved it, so the worst case is that we tell you honestly that we need a better photograph.