Guide

Pet Portrait Paint by Numbers

Pets are the single most popular thing people convert, and for good reason — a painted portrait of your own dog or cat carries something a printed photo does not. But fur is also the hardest subject to convert well. This page covers how to photograph a pet for conversion, and the settings that keep the likeness intact.

Photographing a pet for conversion

The conversion works from edges and colour blocks, so the photo needs both. In practice that means:

Get down to their eye level. Shooting from standing height gives you a foreshortened head and a lot of floor. Kneeling changes the result completely.
Use window light, not flash. Flash flattens fur into a single bright mass and causes eye-shine, which converts into a strange pale disc.
Fill the frame with the head and chest. A full-body shot across a room leaves the face too small to hold any detail once regions are merged.
Separate them from the background. A black dog on a dark sofa or a white cat on a pale duvet gives the edge detector nothing. Move them, or move yourself.

Treats held just above the lens are the reliable trick for getting ears forward and eyes open. Burst mode, then pick the sharpest frame.

Settings that keep fur looking like fur

Fur is thousands of fine gradations, and the conversion has to reduce it to flat regions. Two things help:

Use 16 to 20 colours. Below about 14, fur collapses into poster-like slabs and most breeds stop being recognisable. Above about 22 you get many tiny regions that are tedious to paint and do not add much at normal viewing distance.

Judge the preview on the eyes, not the fur. Likeness in animal portraits lives almost entirely in the eyes and the muzzle. If those read correctly in the preview, the painting will look like your pet even if the coat is simplified. If the eyes have merged into the surrounding dark, try a different photo rather than a different colour count.

Memorial portraits

A large share of pet conversions are memorials, often made from an old, imperfect phone photo — the only one somebody has. Those photos are usually lower resolution and badly lit, which is exactly the hard case.

Two things genuinely help. Crop tightly to the head before uploading, so the limited detail that exists is spent where it matters. And drop to around 14 colours: a slightly more stylised, graphic portrait reads far better from a grainy source than a high-colour one, which tends to turn noise into speckled regions.

The preview is free, so it costs nothing to try three versions of the same photo and keep the one that looks most like them.

Printing and framing

For a portrait that is going on a wall, the 16×20" poster size on heavier paper or canvas stock is worth it — fur detail benefits from the extra area more than most subjects. The vector SVG in your download scales to any size cleanly, so a print shop can work from it without quality loss.

If it is a gift, the Personalised Gift Pack adds a dedication line to the printed page. See custom paint by numbers gifts for more on that.

Try it on your own photo

The preview is free and takes about ten seconds — you can see the numbered outline and change the colour count before deciding whether to buy the download.

Choose a photo

One-time $2.99. No account, no subscription, and your photo is never stored on disk.

Frequently asked questions

Will it still look like my dog?

If the eyes and muzzle are clear and well-lit in the source photo, yes. The free preview shows you the actual numbered outline before you pay, so you can check likeness rather than take it on trust.

Can I use an old or low-quality photo?

Often yes, and it is a common case for memorial portraits. Crop tightly to the head first and use a slightly lower colour count — around 14 — which handles grain much better than a high-colour conversion.

Does it work for cats, horses, rabbits and birds?

Yes. Nothing in the process is dog-specific. The same guidance applies: eye-level, soft light, fill the frame, and contrast against the background.

Can I get more than one pet in the same picture?

Yes, though two animals means the detail is split between them. If they are different colours it works well; two similar-coloured pets touching each other tend to merge into one shape.