Portrait UnionA portrait of who they were
Not a memorial plaque and not a sad picture. A painting made from one photograph you already have, so the version of them you keep on the wall is the one you would want to look at every day.
The preview is free and watermarked. Nothing is charged until you have seen it, and there is no account to make.
If the only photo you have is blurry or old
This is the most common reason people stop before they start. The good photographs were taken on a phone that no longer exists, or they are prints in an album, creased and faded, and the one clear shot is from a decade ago.
You can do it in two passes on this site. First send the old print through the restoration: scratches, creases, stains and fading are repaired and the photograph comes back in colour, at its own proportions. Then bring that restored file back to the portrait and paint from it. Both previews are free, so you can see whether the photograph is good enough before you decide anything.
A restoration repairs; it does not invent. A face too damaged to read stays soft rather than becoming a sharper stranger, and a torn-away corner is left plain rather than filled in with a guess. That matters more here than anywhere else on this site: a portrait of an animal who is nearly them is worse than no portrait at all.
It takes minutes, not three weeks
A commissioned pet portrait usually means finding a painter, waiting for a slot, sending the photograph, waiting again, and seeing the result three to six weeks later when it is finished and paid for. People grieving are asked to hold a decision open for a month.
Here the painting comes back in about a minute, watermarked and free, and you look at it before any money is involved. If it is not right you have lost a minute. If it is right, the file is yours immediately and a canvas is ordered from the same page.
Three quiet styles
The site offers twelve styles, and most of them are wrong for this. A crown, armour or candlelit gold suits a portrait made in fun; for a memorial these three are the ones people keep.
Samples painted by the studio from stock photographs. Whichever you pick, the breed, markings, fur colour, eye colour and expression come from your own photograph — including a greying muzzle or a torn ear, because those are the parts that make it them.
The canvas is the point
A file on a phone is a file on a phone. What people actually want from a memorial is something in the room: gallery-wrapped canvas on a wooden stretcher, hung in a hallway or standing on a shelf, seen in passing rather than opened deliberately. Canvas starts at €69.99 with shipping included, and every print comes with the digital files as well, so you can reprint it or send it to family later without buying anything again.
Prints are made in three to five business days and then shipped; allow about two weeks. If you would rather have only the file, that is a fair choice too — it is the same painting.
| Product | What is included | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Digital portrait | One file, 2048 × 2560 px, without watermark | €4.99 |
| Both variants | Two files, portraits only, save €1.99 | €7.99 |
| Gallery canvas | 20×25 to 75×60 cm, shipping and digital files included | from €69.99 |
| Framed canvas | 20×25 to 80×60 cm, Black, Dark wood, Natural wood frame, ready to hang, shipping and digital files included | from €129.99 |
Prices shown in EUR. Visitors in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, Korea and Mexico are charged in GBP or USD at the checkout price shown on the preview page.
If it does not look like them, we do it again
The preview exists so that you never buy a portrait you have not seen. But sometimes a photograph is difficult in a way nobody could have predicted, and the painting comes back as a dog of the right breed rather than as your dog.
Write to hello@portraitunion.com with the link and say what is wrong. We will run it again ourselves — a different style, a different crop, or a different photograph if you have one — at no cost, whether or not you have paid. This is the one thing on the site we will not shrug about.
Start when you are ready
The preview is free and there is nothing to cancel later. There is no hurry from our side.
More on styles, photographs and timing: pet memorial portraits.