A painted portrait of your cat, from the photo you already have.

Getting a good photograph of a cat is surprisingly hard. They're alert when you don't want them to be, blurry when they finally settle, or lit from behind by the window they always choose. What you end up with is often one photo, taken on a quiet afternoon, catching a particular angle of the face, where they actually look like themselves. That photo is all we need.

What the portrait looks like

We render the photo in a painterly oil style: warm earth tones, soft natural light, a neutral parchment background. Head-and-shoulders composition. The result reads as a painting, not a filtered photograph. There are no props, no costumes, no cartoon simplification. What you get is a likeness: the specific shape of your cat's face, their eyes, the way they hold themselves.

The painted style works well with cats because it handles coat variation honestly. A tortoiseshell's patched colouring, the faint M on a tabby's forehead, the dense black of a cat you can hardly photograph in low light: the technique captures texture in a way that a straight print of a phone photo often doesn't.

Coat patterns and how we handle them

Cats are visually distinct in a way that dogs, broadly speaking, aren't. Two Labradors look alike from a distance. Two cats rarely do. We work regularly with the following:

• Tabby: mackerel, classic, ticked, spotted. The striping and the face markings are preserved, not averaged out.
• Tortoiseshell and calico: the asymmetric patching is one of the hardest things to render and one of the most distinctive. We take care with it because it's usually what the owner recognises first.
• Black: photographing a black cat well is difficult; the face often disappears into the coat in artificial light. If you have a photo where the features are visible, the portrait will be clear. If you're unsure, send us what you have and we'll tell you honestly whether it'll work.
• Ginger and white: the warm tones in the style suit ginger cats particularly well. White cats require good contrast in the source photo so the face doesn't flatten.
• Pointed coats: Siamese, Ragdoll, Birman and similar. The contrast between face and body colouring comes through clearly in the painterly style.

For a living cat or a memorial

A lot of people commission this while their cat is still here. There's nothing morbid about it. Cats age visibly, the face changes over the years, and a portrait made now captures what they look like at this point in their life. Others come to it after losing their cat, wanting a permanent image that isn't a phone screenshot on a black screen.

Both are the same product. The work is the same. What differs is when it's made, and what the portrait means to you.

The photo problem, and how to work around it

Cats don't take direction. They're not going to sit in front of a white wall and look at the camera. What you're usually looking for is a photo with decent light on the face: daylight is better than artificial, and the cat's eyes should be at least partially open. Close-up is better than far away; a photo where your cat fills most of the frame gives us more to work with than one where they're across the room.

Indoor cats sometimes have the problem of every photo being taken against the same sofa, in the same light, in the same corner. That's fine. We're drawing the cat, not the background. The indoor cat who lived on a particular windowsill, under a specific lamp, on the kitchen table, we've worked from all of those.

What doesn't work: extreme backlighting, photos where the cat is mostly fur with no visible face, very small images cropped from group photos. If you're not sure about a photo, there's a note field in the intake form and we'll reply before we start.

How it's made

We use AI tools to draft and illustrate, then we check every piece by hand before it reaches you. If what comes back doesn't feel right, you tell us, and we rework it, or we refund you in full. The painted style is generated from your photograph, then reviewed before printing. We're not applying a filter. The model is working from the photo's light, the cat's specific features, the depth in the image. If the result doesn't look like your cat (if the markings are wrong or the expression is off), that's a rework, not a take-it-or-leave-it.

Posture and expression

Cats have a particular quality of self-possession that makes a portrait either work or fall flat. A dog will look alert and engaged; a cat might be mid-blink, or regarding you with the particular indifference that is somehow entirely its personality. That expression is what makes the portrait recognisable to people who knew the cat.

We aim for a composed, present quality in the portrait: not sleepy, not startled, but attentive. If your cat had a defining posture (the one where they sat with both paws folded under, or the half-turn they always did before jumping down), mention it in the intake notes.

Delivering the portrait

Canvas portraits print and ship within 5–9 working days to UK addresses. International shipping is available to Ireland, the EU, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, calculated at checkout, typically £12–£25. You'll see the delivery estimate before you pay.

The canvas arrives ready to display. It'll sit on a shelf, hang on a wall, or go on a mantelpiece. Nothing arrives with a frame, but the stretcher depth is right for any standard frame if you want one later.

Related: canvas portrait, full specification, cat memorial ideas, cat memorial frame.