Pet portrait prices in the UK: from a £15 digital file to hand-painted oil

A pet portrait in the UK costs anywhere from about £10 to well over £500, and the number on its own tells you almost nothing. What changes across that range is not really quality — it is what physically arrives. At the bottom you receive a file. In the middle you receive a print. At the top you receive one original oil painting that a person spent days making by hand.

So the honest way to answer the pet portrait cost question is to climb the ladder one rung at a time and say what lands on your doormat at each price.

Pet portrait cost by type of service, rung by rung

What you are buying	Typical price	What actually arrives
A filter or app effect on your photo	Free to £10	A JPEG. You print it yourself, or you do not.
A digital drawing by a freelance illustrator	£10–£30	A file, drawn on a tablet. Printing is your problem.
A printed "portrait" — your photo, or a digital drawing, on canvas or paper	£40–£90	A machine-made print. No paint on it.
A pencil, charcoal or watercolour by an independent artist	£80–£250	One original on paper, usually A4 or A3.
A hand-painted oil from a studio (ours)	£220–£549	One original oil on canvas, rolled in a tube.
A sitting with a UK portrait painter	Four figures is normal	One original, painted locally, often from life.

The gaps between those rungs are not marketing. A digital file has no material cost and takes an hour of somebody's evening, so it is priced like lunch. A canvas print is a machine pressing ink into cloth; you are paying for the cloth and the courier. A pencil or watercolour is a person's afternoon, and the price is mostly their time.

An oil painting is a person's week. Canvas is primed, the drawing is laid in, then colour is built up in layers, and each layer has to dry before the next goes on. The face has to be right or the whole thing fails, and a dog's eyes are no faster than a person's. That is why hand-painted oil starts where it starts. There is no honest version of the process that takes four hours.

Each rung wins somewhere. A digital file is right for a phone wallpaper or a card. A print is right when you want the photograph itself, large, on a wall, this week, and do not mind that it is a photograph. A local artist is right if you want to meet the person and keep the money in your town. An overseas hand-painting studio like ours is right when you want real oil on canvas and are not prepared to spend four figures.

What the word "portrait" hides on a listing

"Custom pet portrait" describes all six rows in that table. Plenty of sellers are upfront; plenty are not, and the ones that are not tend to price a print at painting money. Three questions settle it before you pay.

What physically arrives, and how is it packed? A file, a rolled print, a framed print, an unframed original. If a seller will not answer that in one sentence, that is the answer.

What is the medium, in plain words? "Oil on canvas" is a medium. "Hand-finished canvas art", "premium wall art" and "textured print" are not media, they are adjectives. "Giclée" always means print. "Hand-embellished" means a print with brush marks added over the top.

How long does it take? A painted portrait promised in seventy-two hours is not painted. Oil needs drying time between layers, and no amount of studio efficiency removes that. Anything under about a fortnight, end to end, is printing something.

One more tell worth knowing: if the listing shows you a digital mock-up of your pet before you pay, you are usually being sold a digital process. We do not send one, because there is nothing to send — the first version of the painting is the painting.

What actually moves the price of a pet portrait

Two things move the pet portrait cost, and only two.

The first is size. A 36 × 48″ canvas is roughly nine times the surface of a 12 × 16″ and takes correspondingly longer to cover properly, so it costs more than twice as much.

The second is how many animals are on the canvas. Each additional pet is £59 — a second set of eyes, a second coat texture, and a composition that has to hold both.

Everything else people expect to be charged for is not charged for. It only changes which size you should be buying.

What you want	Does it change the price?	What it actually changes
A second dog or cat on the same canvas	Yes — £59	Push up a size so both faces have room
A bigger canvas	Yes — see the table below	Presence on the wall
Full body rather than head and shoulders	No	You need a bigger size, or the head shrinks
A renaissance costume, armour, an admiral's coat	No	Nothing. Write it in the notes on the order form
A changed, removed or plain background	No	Nothing
A horse, a dachshund, a rabbit in profile	No	Choose a wide size so the animal is not cropped

The full-body row catches people out. A whole standing spaniel on a 12 × 16″ leaves a head about the width of a two-pound coin, and no painter can rescue that. If you want the tail, the legs and the sofa it is lying on, go up at least one size. Dog portrait ideas walks through which crops tend to work.

The costume row is the one people do not believe. There is no style menu and no style surcharge. If you want your cat painted as a Venetian duchess, or your greyhound in a hussar's jacket, write it in the notes field on the order form and it costs the same as a plain background.

Our pet portrait prices by size, for one pet and for two

Every painting is oil on canvas, hand-painted in our studio in Xiamen, and ships rolled in a tube so you can frame it locally.

Size	One pet	Two pets
12 × 16″	£220	£279
16 × 20″	£275	£334
20 × 24″	£330	£389
24 × 36″	£449	£508
30 × 40″	£489	£548
36 × 48″	£549	£608

WELCOME20 takes 20% off a first commission, so the smallest single-pet portrait is £176 and the most-ordered 16 × 20″ is £220.

For most dogs and cats, 16 × 20″ is where it stops looking like a keepsake and starts looking like a painting. Below that you are buying something for a shelf, which is a legitimate thing to buy as long as you know that is what it is. Start a dog or cat commission on the pet portraits page; horses, rabbits and parrots start here instead.

Nothing is charged when you submit the order form. We look at your photograph, reply within one working day with an honest read on whether it will paint well and what size we would push you towards, and send a payment link only once you are happy with the plan.

How long each rung takes, and what that means for a birthday or Christmas

What you are buying	Realistic timeline
A digital file	Hours to two days
A print	Two to five days, plus post
A pencil or watercolour from an independent artist	A week to a month, depending on their queue
A hand-painted oil from us	About three to four weeks to paint, plus delivery

Before your painting ships you receive a photograph of the finished piece, and if it is not right we keep painting until it is. We do not send progress shots along the way — the check happens once, at the end, on the finished painting, which is the only version worth an opinion.

For a dated occasion, count backwards and add the two steps people forget: three to four weeks of painting, plus delivery, plus however long your framer takes, because it arrives rolled and unframed. Early November is comfortable for Christmas and December is not; last order dates for handmade Christmas gifts has the arithmetic. For a birthday in six weeks you are fine. For a birthday next Tuesday, buy a print and be honest with yourself about it.

If the deadline is tight, put the date in the notes and we will say plainly whether it is possible before you pay anything.

Frequently asked questions

What is the cheapest genuinely hand-painted pet portrait?

Ours is £220 for a 12 × 16″, or £176 with WELCOME20 on a first commission. Below roughly £150 anywhere, for oil on canvas, the sums stop working: that is a week of skilled labour plus materials plus international freight. If you find real oil for £80, either somebody is doing it as a hobby and undercharging themselves, or it is not oil. Our full breakdown of where the money goes is in the cost of a custom oil painting guide.

Is a £99 "hand-painted oil painting" real?

Almost never at pet-portrait size. Ask the three questions above. In practice a £99 listing is one of three things: a print described creatively, a very small canvas of 6 × 8″ or so where the maths just about holds, or a hand-embellished print — a machine print with gel brushstrokes rolled over the top so it catches the light. That last one is a real product and some people are happy with it. It is not a painting, and it does not look like one up close.

What does a memorial pet portrait cost?

The same as any other portrait — size and number of animals, nothing else. There is no memorial surcharge. What matters more than the price is the photograph, because you cannot go and take another one; send the one that looks most like them rather than the one that is technically sharpest. Oil painting of your dog covers what we can and cannot recover from an imperfect photo, and painting a cat from a photograph does the same for cats.

What does it cost with a frame?

We do not frame. Every painting ships rolled in a tube, unframed, because a tube survives international freight and a framed canvas often does not, and because a frame bought near your wall suits it better than one picked from a catalogue on another continent. Budget separately: a high-street framer quotes on the day, and the number moves a great deal with size and moulding. How to frame an oil painting in the UK sets out the options and what to ask for.

Does a horse or a rabbit cost more than a dog?

No. The price is size and headcount, whatever the species. What changes with a horse is the shape: a horse in profile needs a wide canvas or you crop the animal, so most horse commissions sit at 20 × 24″ or larger. Small animals go the other way — a rabbit or a guinea pig has a small face, and at 12 × 16″ there is plenty of room for it.

Do I pay when I submit the order form?

No. The form takes your photograph, your subject and your size, and charges nothing. We reply within one working day with an honest read and a recommendation, then send a payment link once you are happy. If we think the photo will not make a good painting, we say so before you have spent anything.