Creating the image
This page uses votives to demonstrate, but the information is applicable to each custom product I create.
If you visit the page on this site for my commissioned pet portraits you will read that I use photos to create the portraits, but I don’t copy photos. Instead, I specialize in creating the image you have in mind for your portrait, often combining a dozen or more photos.
As you can see in Sam’s original photo, the light fell from above and filled her eyes with shadow and I had to carefully open that up to see her eyes. The light was also dim and a very warm tone—the carpet is actually off-white, so color needed to be corrected as well.
When I work with your provided photo for your votive I use the same techniques from my decades of portraiture on paper to prepare the image to fit the votive, but I use Photoshop instead of pastels or watercolor. I first size the image into my template so that the face fills the majority of the front of the votive, and the eyes are about at the level the votive flame would be. I remove background distractions and correct distortions if necessary. I correct colors due to use of a flash or a filter. Most important are corrections to their eyes from use of a flash or from shadows because the light should be able to shine through their eyes and look normal.
Then I choose a background color or pattern that suits the subject, or pull ideas for those from the supplied photos. I want the subject to be prominent on the votive, so the background is either a complementary color or provides contrast, lighter or darker. I chose a dark blue for Sam because blue is a color complement to orange and would provide a dark background so the light would shine through her while the background stayed darker.
For Marnie, below, I chose a light neutral tan background because she is primarily dark, and their photos showed that their home is filled with neutral earth tones.
Tips on choosing a photo
It’s nice to be able to get a photo where they are looking right at you, and with the number of photos people take today that’s often possible.
For Marnie’s votive I chose the straight-on relaxed gaze. The red bandanna was too bright and would isolate her face, and though she has a nice head tilt in the first photo, her ear is tipped and she looks a little startled.
If a straight-on gaze isn’t available, then one where their face is clear is good, even if they aren’t looking directly at you. You’ve seen Luna a few times on this site, and though she’s looking a little off to the side, her image is still effective.
Slightly blurry or excessively filtered images
One of the biggest challenges of photographing animals is that they move far more than humans do, so movement-blurred photos are common. Also, digital photos look great full size on your phone, but if you want to crop one down to just your dog’s face and enlarge it to print, you’ll see it’s a little soft around the edges. With in-camera filters and other filters provided in social media platforms, you can transform a photo completely from its original appearance, but sometimes details are lost, and the resulting photo is often very low-resolution because it’s intended for the small screen of a cell phone.
I can work with much of these issues to a certain extent, using my experience as a graphic designer composing a customer brochure with photos of staff or events pulled from someone’s cell phone. They’re not perfect, but on a votive they are usually acceptable. Above, you can see the best photo Leo’s caretaker had, and it looks fine until you enlarge it to see his face. I used a series of art filters in Photoshop and managed to maintain most of the details, but this is about as far as I would go with blur or distortion.
More than one subject on a votive
I’ve actually created several of these with two animals or with a human and an animal. My goal is always to focus on their faces, but sometimes the recipient has a dear photo of two pets together, or a human and a pet, and that’s how it is, and it’s fine. If this is a gift we’re creating for someone else, you probably know them best and can determine what they’d like.
Above and below, Leaper and Annie were feral cats and bonded when they met in her colony, which at one point she had to remove for their safety so five cats came to her home and eventually adapted. Leaper and Annie stayed closely bonded and later died a month apart. She couldn’t see them apart on their votive. Above, you can see the difference when we use the full photo and when it’s cropped to just their faces. Below, another photo she considered using, just to remember the moment.
In another example, this unfortunate recipient unexpectedly lost her cat and her dog a month apart and her friend asked if I could put them together on the votive. You’ve also seen Cody and Dakota elsewhere on this site.
There were no good photos of the two of them together, but I am also acquainted with the recipient so we decided I could visit her Facebook page and find what I needed. Looking close, Cody looks crisp and clear, but Dakota not so much. We often photograph cats when they are up on things near our eye level, but dogs we usually photograph on the floor, or somehow below our eye level. This is something I deal with in portraiture all the time but I can work with perspective, and the biggest challenge is usually getting them proportionate to each other. For all the photos she had, only two were ones I could use to make it appear Cody and Dakota were side by side, and one was filtered so much I couldn’t correct it. The one I used was filtered as well and was lower resolution than Cody’s photo, but they fit together very nicely.
Including a decorative or patterned background
Background items can sometimes be a part of the memory that’s wanted, or a customer may want a specific addition to the background related to the subject. It works in some cases, but in others the subject is lost in the pattern no matter how it’s done. I’ve created votives of cats in flower gardens that I wish I could share. Creating votives with a background pattern like the ones I show below would have a small extra charge for the extra time, $10.00 to $25.00. The examples below show how a background pattern can work.
Pearl loved to nap on the screened porch, which had furniture in this pattern. I could pull enough of the pattern from the photos to be able to collage together an all-over pattern.
Ziggy Stardust’s person asked if I could use purple and add some stars in the background because of her namesake. The purple was easy, and I have decades of clip art from design, I knew exactly the starry background I could pull and use.
You’ll see a multi-color watercolor pattern in several instances on this site, like the note card that comes with the votive, the simple garden flag and the simple votive. Sometimes I’ll use it in the background for darker animals, if it seems appropriate for the recipient. Stormy’s person loves rainbow bridge items and it looks like Stormy is in the clouds.
Customizations for your practice
In addition to the basic creation of a votive, I can customize the votive to identify your practice. I can add your logo, or a brief standard or custom message, or use your business colors for the background, by setting up a template which I would keep on file. Designing the idea and showing proofs would be a one-time cost of $25.00.
One of my customers is a pet cremation business, and I am also her customer. I assist her with her Pet Memorial Sunday event every September, but in 2020 we couldn’t gather under a tent as usual. She decided we could certainly distance, even stay inside our cars, in the area she hosts it. To make up for the lack of physical community she wanted to give something to her families, so I made 20 votives for that event that used her logo colors and included her logo and a message.
Votives are kept in confidence
I photograph each votive I make for my records and to keep the details of what it looked like for my reference. I never use a votive in any public venue, whether for display or self-promotion, without permission of both the giver and the recipient.
You can also read about Other Memorial Gifts, Animal Sympathy Cards and Commissioned Pet Portraits.
All images and text © 2022-2023 Bernadette E. Kazmarski • www.custompetmemorialvotives.com
All images and content are copyrighted and may not be used or reproduced in any way without my written permission. Please contact me if you are interested in using any of my content.