Pop Pet Paintings

This Christmas, I relied heavily on my crafting skills for gifts, especially for my brother Heath and his wife Cholle because I knew they would appreciate my creativity more than anyone else. Heath & Cholle recently bought their first home, and I really wanted to create something as kind of a housewarming-type gift. Cholle works at an animal shelter and is in love with all little furry creatures, and both of them love, love, love their pets. Cholle takes beautiful pictures and has many great ones of their 2 cats and 2 dogs, so I thought maybe I could take those and turn them into something of my own.

At first, I intended to make silhouette paintings of each pet mostly because I knew it would be simple but pretty cool at the same time. Unfortunately, these pets are squirmers and taking profile pictures of them proved to be pretty impossible for Cholle. So I proceeded with photos that Cholle already had posted on MySpace:

Phinneous

Pidgin

Asa

Tiberius

I saved the photos to my computer, opened them in Paint, and began painting over the picture with appropriate colors. It was really time consuming, and I'm sure there are fancy programs out there that would do this for you automatically. Unfortunately, I do not have these programs, so I have to do old school. After that was complete, I printed them off. In transferring the picture to the canvases, I shaded a piece of paper with pencil to make my own graphite transfer paper (again, this can be bought, but I am old school) and traced my printed off pictures using my transfer paper. With that, all that was left to do was essentially a paint by number. Easy, right?

I can't say I'm completely pleased with Phinneous. In fact, I painted him twice using two different pictures, but I blame it on Phinneous. He's just not a photogenic cat. Cholle's favorite was Tiberius.