Pet military portrait

The officer portrait is a genre with very fixed rules, and the comedy comes from applying them without flinching. Chest square to the viewer, chin level, decorations arranged in strict order of precedence, and a background of nothing in particular. It is a format designed to say this person is serious, which is why putting an animal inside it works: the uniform does all the declaring while your pet just sits there.

It differs from the royal portrait in tone as much as costume. Royal is about inherited status: velvet, a crown, something you were born into. Military is about earned rank, and that reads as funnier on an animal precisely because it implies a career. A dog in a crown is absurd. A dog with four campaign medals invites the question of what it did.

The medals are where people spend the longest looking, and they are deliberately unreadable. Real decorations belong to real armies and real campaigns, so a portrait that copied a specific set would be making a claim about a country and a war. Here the ribbons are invented: recognisably in the language of medals without saying anything, which is the only honest way to do it and also the funnier one, since it leaves the entire service record to the imagination.

Give it a front-facing photo taken at chest height where the shoulders are clearly visible. This style needs somewhere to hang the epaulettes and pin the medals, and a picture cropped tight to the head leaves the uniform nothing to sit on. A seated three-quarter body shot is close to ideal.