How To Make A Custom Pet Portrait Using Photoshop (Renaissance, Pop Art & Costume Video Guides)

Custom pet portraits have been all the rage for a few years now. Our Insta feeds are full of awesome dog portraits, cats as princesses and parrots as pirates. It leaves many of us asking, where have they come from and how do you make your own. 

Pet portraits break into many categories, including the below most popular formats

Costume based pet portraits - how to make a Renaissance style pet portrait 

Costume pet portraits are where your pets face appears on a wide array of different costume designs, from renaissance style royalty costumes, to awkward step brothers, Harley Davidsson bikers and just about everything in between. 

These portraits are digitally rendered using tools like Adobe Photoshop. The process always begins with a costume design which will have a placeholder on the design for your pets face. He majority of the technical (photoshop) expertise lies in the creation of the base costume (we have 3 full time graphics team members here at SquishyFacedCrew and they focus on making new concepts between fulfilling your orders). Once the base costume with face placeholder is ready, next up is the pets photo. 

We have spoken previously about how important pet photography is in this process, and you can read our best tips here. The key takeaways are clear photos taken in daylight work best. 

The pets face then needs digitally copying from the provided photo and adding to the costume design. This is done in Photoshop, and the pets face is then blended into the costume and the design is done and ready to go. 

Some Of Our Renaissance Pet Portrait Templates

How to Make a Pop Art Pet portrait 

Pop are designs are executed slightly differently to costume based pet portraits. Pop art designs require digital reengineering of the photos you provide. At SquishyFacedCrew we have built out 3 unique filter designs to match our unique pop art designs. This enables our team to efficiently make our pop art designs at scale. 

The first step in the process of making a pop art custom pet canvas is to open the original photo in photoshop. The photo will need a degree of digital cleansing, some photos much more so than others. We then apply our filters and make the requisite edits to ensure the pet pop art canvas looks out looking great. 

Pop art canvases are much more subjective than the costume designs. On the latter, so long as the face sits as expected, the expectation is quite defined and clear. You want to see your pet as the King, Queen, Superman or whatever it may be. Pop art on the other hand is much more subjective as its much more of an artistic design. 

This is why we have our unique digital proofing service, which we coded from the ground up. Its a tremendously valuable element of the SquishyFacedCrew service and enables our customers to benefit from unlimited revisions before we print their design, whether its then printed on canvas, t-shirts, mugs, phone cases or whatever else is chosen. 

Trending Pop Art Products & Designs 

Personalised pet paintings 

Personalised pet commissions are an entirely different process again, and they’re much different to the previous digital examples. This is not an area of expertise for us at SquishyFacedCrew; we’re not making pet paintings. There’s a whole bunch of tremendous pet artists on sites like Etsy.com and we’d recommend that you start there. There’s lots of really talented artists who have great ratings. Expect to be paying in the range of 2-5+x the costs of a digital pet portrait when buying a physically painted portrait. 

The above are the three predominant forms of pet portraits on the market at the moment. 

If you’re ready to start exploring pet portraits of your own, but maybe you don't fancy making your own or you want to let the SquishyFacedCrew professional artists handle it for you, we have some of our most popular designs below for you to take a look at:

Have you taken our fun pet personality quiz yet?