Starting with some finished pictures here, and I’ll be going into my experiences making the piece below for those of you that are interested. As my second official pet portrait, I was definitely learning as I went with this one. Regardless, I’m so proud of how it turned out!
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But how did it all start?
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One of my friends became the caretaker of their senior childhood dog in 2024. I spent some time at their house here and there, and Nala was always happy to say hi and get pets from the both of us. As time went on, Nala’s muzzle got grayer and grayer. My partner and I moved out of the city, and sometime while we were getting settled she actually did pass.
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Feeling for my friend, I felt compelled to offer them a free memorial piece for them to remember her by. They agreed, and sent me a good collection of reference images to use, some of which are pictured below.
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Sketching some options…
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From the reference images my friend provided me, I started whipping up some sketches. They wanted irises in the background and for her to be smiling, so that’s what I focused on first. Once I’d nailed down a general outline to go off, I made a few variants for my friend to choose from. I wasn’t sure if they’d want a halo or not, so that was the main decision to be made. They ended up choosing the first image below and giving me the go ahead to start working on the project.
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Collage Time!!!
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From here, it was time to start the actual collage. I painted a ton of different papers with the colors I thought I’d need, and got to work cutting out shapes.
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I painted my base paper blue to start, then I made the irises to get a better feel for collage. At this point, I hadn’t made a collage in several years.
I also traced my earlier sketch of Nala onto a base brown paper. All the details and shading would eventually end up glued to this.
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Here’s a pic from the very beginning of the process on Nala. I decided to collage everything off the base blue paper and glue it down later for maximum mobility.
I wanted to use my painted papers to depict shadows as well as details. To the right, you can see me starting with some of the larger pieces.
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Here, I was working on the harness details and getting ready to glue the entire dog to my blue paper with the irises I’d made.
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I glued everything to my base and was liking how it was coming along, but it still felt like a level of detail was missing. The eyes are an obvious one, but I also wanted to define a few more things.
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To add all those important details, I used colored pencils on top of the papers. I especially liked this method for her eyes, as it kept them a bit softer than cut paper would have.
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This is just a close up shot so you can see the colored pencils a bit better. I’m particularly fond of the harness and the irises.
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At this point, I only had the halo left to add. I decided to use gold leaf for it, which is beautiful in person but unfortunately does not photograph the best. That’s why it’s so bright and kind of blown out in the finished images.
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Speaking of finished images, why don’t we take one more look at her?
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So what did I learn?
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As is the case with trying any art making method that’s new to you, I learned a LOT from this piece. Painting papers for collage was great, but I had to make sure I was choosing paper that was thick enough. Thin paper doesn’t glue down as well, and has a higher tendency towards ugly edges in my opinion.
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I also rediscovered my love of colored pencils for details. This would roll over into my current pet portrait process, even though I’ve partially moved on from collage. I used to stick to markers for details like this, but the colored pencils are much softer and allow for a wider range of application methods.
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While there were material choices here that I loved, there was one that I learned to despise. Gold leaf. I’m sure it’s a learning curve, but the gold leaf halo took a bunch of different tries to get looking decent. It’s nice to have that element of shine and it does make the piece feel more precious, but I had a horrible time getting it applied.
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Lastly, this piece furthered my joy of making pet portraits for people. After this, I would go on to make more portraits to gift to friends. It’s something that I find super fulfilling, and this piece is what truly made me consider doing pet portraits more seriously as an art form.
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What do you think? Would you ever try making a collage piece like this? Is there anything that you would try differently? Drop a comment and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!
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bogprism 
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