How it's Made

technique

All my portraits are done through a process of digital rotoscoping, although in my case I use it for single images, not animation. This is done by digitally "painting" over a real life photograph. Instead of attempting to reproduce the original image in a realistic fashion (as most pet portraitists do), I am interested in taking the complexities of a pet's coloring and simplifying it to three or four ultra-UNrealistic colors. At the same time I try to maintain some sense of reality in the final interpretation.

Basic Steps

 

In the example above, the original photograph was of fairly poor quality. The camera's flash made Sasha's entire face, neck and chest too bright and her pupils were huge! However I thought her pose and the angle at which the photo was taken would be perfect for a cute painting. You'll notice in the final product that I didn't attempt to copy her eyes from the photo. Instead I changed her eye's direction and opened her mouth slightly, giving her a larger, more cartoon-like expression. The reasons for this were twofold:

1) To compensate for the flaws of the photograph, and 2) To make the painting more vibrant than the photograph. So in this case I painted over details to simplify the image but at the same time I added others.

Printing

After the artwork is complete, I create a high-resolution PDF of the image. At that point I send the file off to my preferred digital printer, and a day or two later I have the physical product. Typically I have the image printed at 16"x20". I find this is a nice poster-like size, and it can easily be made from a 4.5"x6" original with little-to-no loss in quality. In fact, I prefer starting with a smaller image (dimension-wise), painting over it, and then blowing it up (as opposed to increasing the size before painting). I find this smooths-out the jagged edges that are sometimes associated with digital work.