Having a custom commissioned portrait can be a lot of fun — if you have the right attitude and have a good idea of what you want.
Once you have decided to have a portrait painted, you may contact painters who work from photos. They will work with you and take your photos and turn them into hand painted oil portraits on canvas. One of the most important parts of this process is selecting the right image, or images, to be painted. If you ask an accomplished painter to paint a poorly composed snapshot, they can do it – but who wants that? It will just look like a snapshot in oil paints. The composition is important to convey the meaning and emotion behind the people, pets or landscapes that you want painted.
Think Foreground + Background
When we take family photos, there is often a lot of distracting visual “noise” in the background. Dirty dishes, Christmas present wrapping, and worse. When your subject is surrounded by all that noise, it distracts from the meaning and composition of the portrait. You have two choices: you can either have your painter use a “studio background” that is like what you would see in a photography studio. This can be subtle shades of any color, often a blue/gray mix. Sometimes it might want to be a bright red – just to juice up the composition!
The other option is to choose a different background from a photo you love. Maybe you have a favorite summer cabin, or a grassy field in the summer time, in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, or even the top of Mount Everest! If you supply your portrait artist with your favorite settings, they can create a masterpiece with your subject literally anywhere you would like them to be.
Think Mix-n-Match
Once you go through your boxes of photos, you will likely find some photos that are close, but not quite there. You may have three kids smiling and one crying, for example. In this case, you would want to find another (smiling) photo of the crying child, and have your portrait artist paint that image of the child into the portrait. Other people want to create memorable portraits of people who never lived at the same time, so there is no single photo with all of the people in them. You can have your portrait artist combine multiple generations into one family portrait, if you just ask. (I have seen people do the same thing with pets – creating a portrait of every dog they have had during their lifetime, all in one setting.)
Portrait painters like Omniportraits or Equineportraitsonline are glad to work with you to mix whatever you want in order to get the kind of painting you will enjoy for many years.
Once you have worked with your portrait artist to compose your masterpiece, they will get to work turning your ideas into art!