Here's a thing that happens quite regularly. I send a customer their preview, and they reply within about ninety seconds with some version of: "how did you know about the ear?"
I didn't know about the ear. I just looked at the photograph for a very long time.
This post is about what I'm actually doing during those hours — the specific things I hunt for in a photo, and why a portrait that gets the fur colour perfectly right can still, somehow, not look like your dog.
Likeness doesn't live where people think it does
Ask most people what makes a pet portrait accurate and they'll say the colours and the markings. Those matter, obviously. But you could get every marking mathematically correct and still hand someone a drawing that makes them go "…yeah, that's lovely" in the tone of voice that means it isn't quite right.
Likeness lives in the asymmetries. It lives in the specific, slightly wrong, entirely unrepeatable details that a photograph captures by accident and a careless drawing smooths away.
Every animal is a little bit lopsided. That lopsidedness is the likeness.
The eyes, and specifically the space around them
I spend more time on eyes than on anything else, and most of that time isn't spent on the eyes themselves.
The colour of the iris matters less than you'd expect. What actually creates the expression is everything immediately around it: how much white shows and on which side, where the eyelid cuts across the top of the iris, the exact distance between the eye and the eyebrow ridge, and whether the two eyes sit level or one is fractionally higher.
Dogs in particular have enormously expressive brow muscles — it's a thing they evolved specifically to communicate with us, which I find almost unbearably touching. That one lifted eyebrow that means are we going out? is a real anatomical feature, and if I draw the brows flat and level, the whole face goes vacant. The dog becomes generic. The lights go off.
Cats are the opposite problem: their expression lives almost entirely in the degree of openness. The difference between a cat who is content and a cat who is deeply unimpressed is about two millimetres of upper eyelid.
Ears do the emotional heavy lifting
Ears are the single most under-observed feature in pet photography and the single most important one for making a portrait feel alive.
Things I look for:
- Do they match? Very often they don't. One up, one half-down. One that folds a bit further over. A tip that's permanently bent from an old scrap.
- Where do they actually sit on the skull? Higher and wider than most people imagine.
- How do they behave at rest? A dog listening has completely different ears from a dog dozing, and drawing the alert version of a fundamentally sleepy dog makes them look like a stranger.
- Is there fluff? The wispy bits at the base, the feathering along the edge, the tuft that sticks out sideways. Enormously characterful and almost always ignored.
If a customer tells me a portrait is almost right but they can't say why, my first check is nearly always the ears.
The muzzle, which is where the age lives
The shape of a muzzle from the front is one of the strongest identifiers an animal has — the width, whether it tapers or stays blocky, how far the lip line drops at the sides.
And then there's the grey. Older pets go grey around the muzzle and eyes first, and how far that grey has spread is a very precise indicator of when in their life a photo was taken. I always ask myself: is this the pet as they were at their peak, or as they were at the end?
Neither is more correct. Some people want the young, ridiculous, bouncing version. Some want the grey-faced elder statesman who slept eighteen hours a day and was perfect. It's worth telling me which one you're picturing, because the answer changes the drawing significantly.
The one white hair, the freckle, the scar
These are my favourites, and they're the ones that produce the ninety-second reply.
The single white patch on the chest, shaped like something. The freckle on the nose. The bald patch from an old operation that never grew back properly. The one paw that's white when the other three aren't. The nick out of the ear from before you knew them.
A generic pet drawing removes all of these, because they read as imperfections. But they're not imperfections. They're the identifying details — the ones you'd list if someone asked you to describe them to a stranger. They're what makes it your animal rather than a member of the same breed.
If your pet has something unusual about them, tell me, even if you think it's ugly. Especially then.
Posture, which is character made visible
Some animals hold themselves upright and self-important. Some are a permanent puddle. Some sit with their front paws turned slightly inward. Some cats fold themselves into a loaf so tight that no legs are visible at any point.
I try to catch the attitude in the pose even when I'm only drawing a head and shoulders. A slight forward lean reads as interested. A tilt reads as questioning. A head held fractionally high reads as smug, and some dogs are smug, and pretending otherwise does them a disservice.
What I do with the things you write to me
When you fill in the box about your pet, I read all of it before I draw a single line.
Some of it is directly useful: "his left ear is the one that flops", "she's much lighter around the eyes than that photo suggests", "he's got a scar on his nose from a disagreement with a cat".
But the part I find most useful is the part that isn't technical at all. "He is a very serious little man and takes his job as a doorbell extremely seriously." "She has never once come when called and I don't think she's ever going to." "He's frightened of one specific cushion."
I can't point at a line in the drawing and tell you where that information went. But it goes somewhere. Knowing an animal is dignified rather than daft changes the tilt of the head by a few degrees, and those few degrees are the whole thing.
Why the preview matters
All of the above is me making educated guesses from a photograph. You have years of information I don't have.
Which is exactly why I send a preview before anything is final, and why I mean it when I say please tell me if it isn't right. You are the world's leading expert on your pet's face. If the eyes are slightly too round, or she looks a touch too serious, or he's meant to look far more pleased with himself than that — say so.
Nobody has ever offended me by asking for a change. The only outcome I'd genuinely hate is you politely accepting a drawing that isn't quite them, and then noticing it every single day for the next fifteen years.
Let's get the ear right. 🐾
— Lala x