People ask about the colours more than almost anything else. Why pink? Why that green? Why does a shop about grieving pets look like a summer garden party?
There's a real answer, and it took me a while to be able to say it out loud.
The first drawing was grey
When I drew my girl for the first time, a few weeks after she died, I drew her in greys and soft browns. It seemed like the appropriate thing to do. Sad drawing, sad colours. That's how it works, isn't it?
It was awful. Not badly drawn — well, it was badly drawn, but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that it looked like a memorial. It looked like something you'd put in a frame and then quietly not look at, because looking at it made your throat close up.
And she was not a memorial. She was a menace. She stole an entire chicken breast off a counter once and looked me directly in the eye while doing it. Drawing her in tasteful greys was, frankly, a misrepresentation.
So I started again, and this time I used the brightest colours I had, and something completely different happened. I laughed. At two in the morning, three weeks into the worst grief of my life, I laughed at a drawing of my dead dog, because I had accidentally captured exactly how smug she looked when she was pleased with herself.
That was the moment the whole shop started, really. Not the drawing — the laugh.
Grief is not beige
There's a visual language we've all absorbed for loss: muted tones, soft focus, a lot of white space, everything slightly washed out. It's meant to be respectful, and I understand the impulse. But I think it does something strange. It makes remembering feel like a solemn duty rather than a pleasure.
And the thing is, our pets were not solemn. They were absurd. They chased things that weren't there. They were terrified of the hoover and unbothered by fireworks, or the exact reverse for no discernible reason. They had strong opinions about specific cushions.
Drawing them in bright, loud, unapologetic colour felt like telling the truth about them. The pink isn't there in spite of the grief — it's there because of it. Because what I actually miss is not a quiet, dignified presence. It's a ridiculous one.
Why these two colours specifically
The honest origin story is that the pink and the green were simply the two colours I had open on my iPad the night I redrew her, and by the time I noticed, the drawing was finished and I loved it.
But there are reasons it works, and I've thought about them a lot since:
They fight each other in exactly the right way
Pink and green sit almost opposite one another on the colour wheel. Complementary colours do something optically aggressive when you put them next to each other — the edge between them practically vibrates. It's the reason the portraits catch your eye from across a room before you've consciously looked at them.
Most colour advice tells you to avoid this. I lean into it entirely. A pet portrait should demand attention. That was rather the animal's whole approach to life.
Neither of them is a fur colour
This is the practical reason, and it's the one I appreciate most as an illustrator. No dog is bright pink. No cat is that particular green. Because the palette isn't trying to be realistic, your pet's actual colours — the specific brown, the exact grey, the white patch shaped like a country — stand out completely against it.
If I drew a golden retriever on a warm beige background, the dog would sink into it. Drop the same dog onto bold pink and suddenly every marking reads clearly. The unrealistic background is what makes the realistic details sing.
Together they feel like being alive
Pink is warmth, softness, tongues, noses, the inside of an ear held up to the light. Green is grass, parks, the outside, the walk, the moment they realise where you're going. Between them they cover most of what a pet's life actually looked like.
What this means for your portrait
A few practical consequences, since this is meant to be useful and not just me talking about feelings.
- It works with every coat colour. Black cats, white dogs, ginger everything, tortoiseshells, merles, that indeterminate scruffy brown that half the rescue dogs in the country share. The bold palette is a backdrop, not a costume.
- It suits almost any room. Because the colours are so committed, they read as a deliberate accent rather than a clash. A bright portrait in a neutral room looks intentional. A muted portrait in a neutral room just looks lost.
- It photographs and prints beautifully. Flat bold colour is the friendliest thing you can hand a printer. No subtle gradients to go muddy, no delicate tones to shift.
- It ages well. Not in the fashion sense — in the emotional one. A bright portrait doesn't become harder to look at over time. It becomes a fixture.
If pink and green genuinely isn't you
Then say so and we'll change it.
The house palette is what I default to and what I love, but it's not a rule I'll enforce on your wall. People have asked for portraits in the colours of their living room, in their football team's colours, in the blue of the sea near where they used to walk, in the exact yellow of a much-loved and now-destroyed tennis ball. All of those are good ideas and all of them turned out beautifully.
Just tell me in your order notes, or message me before you order if you'd like to talk it through. The bold, flat, cheerful approach is the part I'd gently defend. The specific hues are entirely negotiable.
The short version
I draw in pink and green because the alternative — soft, sad, tasteful, quiet — would be a lie about what these animals were actually like.
They were loud. They were joyful. They were completely, unreasonably ours.
The colours are just me trying to keep up. 🐾
— Lala x