Custom cat portrait

Custom means two things here and it is worth separating them. One is style: the same cat rendered as an oil painting, a watercolour, a pop-art print or a renaissance noble, so you pick the one that suits the room it is going in rather than the one that happened to be on offer. The other is the cat: the portrait is built from your photos, so the tortoiseshell scramble or the exact placement of a white bib comes through instead of being replaced by a generic cat of roughly the right colour.

If you have more than one cat, do them separately and hang them as a set. Multi-animal portraits are the single hardest thing to get right, because the model has to hold two sets of markings at once and tends to average them into two similar-looking animals. Two portraits in matching frames look deliberate and actually resemble your cats.

The most common regret is picking a style that fights the cat. Very dark cats lose detail in watercolour, and very pale cats disappear into a renaissance background. If you are unsure, oil is the safest across every coat colour: it holds detail in the dark and keeps shape in the light.

Think about where it will hang before you choose. Pop art wants a plain wall and good light; a renaissance portrait wants the opposite and looks best somewhere slightly dim. It is a small thing that decides whether the finished piece looks framed or looks stuck on.