This is the stage where the site is selling something, and it seems right to say so at the top rather than three paragraphs in. We make one thing: a painting of your animal, worked from a photograph you already have, printed in the UK. The pages below cover the styles, the formats, and the cases where a portrait is the wrong answer. Everything in the three stages before this one is free to read and stays free whether you order anything or not.
The reading, in order
- A portrait of your own animal
- Watercolour
- Painting a cat
- Framed, or on canvas
- Where it is printed
- Memorial gifts
- A gift for someone grieving
- For someone who has lost a dog
- For someone who has lost a cat
- Remembrance gifts
- Dog memorials, by breed
- Cat memorials, by breed
- Every memorial page
What these pages keep concluding
Read them side by side and they all arrive at the same narrow point. What people want isn't a picture of a dog, it's a picture of that dog: the ears at the angle they actually sat, the white patch in the wrong place, the expression the rest of the family recognises from the doorway. That is why every page here starts from a photograph you already own rather than from anything on a shelf, and why the preview is free and watermarked. If the painting doesn't look like them, you have lost nothing.
The whole path
The path ends here. The first stage starts back at the grief itself, and the guides hold every piece of writing on this site.
Written by Craig Fearn, Small Goodbyes.