People Are Going Wild For These Custom Wall Decor Portraits (& How To Make Your Own)

While formal portraits date back thousands of years, displaying them in the home spans centuries. You will often see them hung in preserved manor homes of yesteryear, where paintings and, later, photographs of the gentleman and lady of the house, and maybe their ancestors, grace parlor walls. Today, portraits still hold a cherished place in the home, usually of the nuclear family living there. More casual and sometimes playful, these photographs, paintings, and illustrations are now sharing the domicile with yet another member of the clan — the family pet, and people are going wild for these custom wall decor portraits, which you can commission or make on your own.

For animal lovers, the subject matter is a no-brainer when it comes to choosing the perfect artwork for the home. And some are willing to bark up the cash: There are artists who fetch as much as $20,000 for a portrait of their furry one, either one living or immortalized forever after crossing the rainbow bridge. It's more common to purchase varieties on online platforms such as Etsy, with prices starting at about $10 for a digital image that folks then get printed and frame themselves. Styles and options, including personalization and the framing, are as vast as an off-leash dog park.

Luckily, you can affordably DIY this one-of-a-kind wall art for your home. There are a number of apps that will help, and some use AI to get you there. Once you upload a photo, you choose a style such as anime, comic book, cartoon, or avatar, although you can also transform a photo into something resembling a painting. The app will render the image, which can be manipulated with filters, effects, and other tools. You download the image, which can be printed on paper, canvas, metal, wood, or another type of material, and then framed with something found second hand or purchased cheaply on sale or with coupons.

An even less expensive technique for making your own pet's portrait gets back to basics. There are many tutorials online that will teach you how to paint a portrait, for instance. In one method, take a frame and remove the glass. Print a photo of your pet without a background (you can remove the background with your phone's photo app or use a free online program). Lay the glass on top of the photo. Using paint markers, outline the shape of the pet's head and parts of its face, including its eyes, nose, neck, and tufts of fur. You can add highlights for whiskers and other details. Use a paint brush and acrylics to fill shapes. After it's dry, the glass is placed on a paper background of your choice and placed back into the frame.

The most popular style is a straightforward portrait that leans toward realism, either as a headshot or full body. Sometimes the likenesses of several pets will be captured. The most affordable are produced digitally, and makers specialize in different looks: hyperreal, graphic, painterly, etc. Ugly pet portraits also come up in searches, with storefronts selling goofy, googly-eyed drawings and paintings. So do custom cartoons often made to look like a character from a contemporary animated film. Some artists will include the pet's name. Others place the pet in a fantastical scene dressed in Renaissance garb or as a royal. Portraits done by hand are most costly, either painted in oil, acrylic, or watercolor, or drawn in charcoal. Owners might ask to be depicted with their pet, and even have a photo transformed into a kitschy posed retro-style 1980s department store studio portrait. There are merchants who will also turn an animal's face into a stained glass sun catcher.

One of the most popular anthropomorphic portraits shows a dog, cat, or other animal with a cocktail — and you can choose the cocktail. Other fun and unusual depictions will see pets as Jedis with light sabers, cowboys in a Wild West bar, or in full chef regalia in a kitchen. So artistic and imaginative are these portraits that they might just end up being one more way to keep your home stylish when you have pets.