The Adorable Way To Personalize Outdated Thrift Store Art With Pets

Personalized pet art is serious business. The price for a professional painter to whip up custom art of furry family members is steep, and it's not hard to imagine why. If you want to celebrate your pets without the high price tag, immortalize your animals on the cheap by making them part of a secondhand art upgrade. Think of all the dull framed art languishing in stacks at Goodwill. Bland landscapes, ships at sea, or hackneyed rural buildings surrounded by rolling fields are all nearly blank slates for you to add your beloved pets to. 

Altered thrift store art is a viral paint trend that's happily here for the long run. You may have seen people create Halloween decor on a budget by painting ghosts onto thrift store art, and this is a similar idea. It's cheap and accessible, and as long as the original work isn't sentimental or valuable, you have little to lose by giving it a try. 

Having artistic skills helps if you want DIY custom pet art with this common thrift store find, but there are ways around this hurdle if you're running short on talent. A landscape that shows depth and distance is ideal. Creating tiny far-away versions of your animals will be more forgiving, since you won't be adding much detail. However, you could also superimpose a truly remarkable painted image of your pup, kitty, horse, or snake by uploading a picture to PBNify.com, a free online paint-by-number generator.

Silhouettes of our little loves are another way you can paint them into thrifted art, and it takes much less skill to pull this off. There are a handful of ways to create a silhouette, whether it's an online tool or good old-fashioned cutting it out from a photo. You can trace the shape of your friend and fill it in with paint. Another option is to go the other way by highlighting part of the painting within the shape and filling the surrounding parts of the painting with solid color. This route may look best painted over an image of something consistent or continuous, like a close-up of flowers, an abstract print, or a seashore and sky.

Straight-up photos can also have a place on the right background. In just the right size and spot on your thrifted art piece, a decoupaged photograph can make your upgrade extra special. For this creative way to use decoupage in your home, you can place your pet's face on the head of a portrait, have kitty peek out a cottage window, or make them sit at a Parisian cafe. Why not let an oversized Rover loom over a mountain ridge? Make a few printouts and experiment before committing. Attach your image atop the art piece with Mod Podge, hang it in your space, and enjoy your quirky yet sentimental creation.