DIY pet portrait painting on plates

I love adding to my animal plate gallery wall and in this post, I’m sharing how I made my own pet portrait painting on a plate to hang on our wall. This is not my first decorative plate DIY and I’m sure it won’t be my last.

I have a custom Rachel Kozlowski plate for all my cats on our kitchen wall except for our three new young kitties Maya, Walter, and Willy. The kids can’t make up their minds about what they want them to look like on the plates and one day when we know exactly how their characteristics evolved while getting older then we will get one made by her.

For now, I wanted a more affordable version until the time I have some made by Rachel.

DIY pet portrait painting on plates

Supplies needed to make your customized pet plate:

• free Clip2Comic app from the app store (HERE)
• photo of your pet
• sponge brush HERE or brush
• white acrylic paint (HERE)
• scissors
• clear glass plates (I bought THESE)
• my favorite plate hangers (HERE) and you can also check out how to hang a plate on a wall.
• clear mod podge HERE (or 2 parts Elmer’s glue mixed with 1 part water which doesn’t dry completely clear)

Mod Podge Recipe

Here is the mod podge recipe if you decide to make your own as I did. Let me remind you that it doesn’t dry as nice and clear as clear mod podge and I just ordered clear to try it to make more plates.

Step-by-step DIY pet portrait painting tutorial

Here is one of the pet portraits I used for this project. It was taken by me right after we adopted Maya. I love it and her sad big eyes:

For my decorative animal plates, I wanted a sketched look so I looked for some sketch apps in the app store. A couple of years ago I used the Waterlogue app to make art of my daughter. Check out that DIY watercolor wall art portrait because I love it.

I wanted a slightly different look for this little craft project. I found several different sketching apps but settled on the Clip2Comic app. All you have to do is take a photo of your pet and open it in the app. I ended up using the comic setting which is the third setting on the bottom strip of the app.

You can see the setting in below photo which is highlighted in blue.

You can use any photo and cut your pet out after printing it on standard printer paper. It doesn’t matter if your image has a background or not since you are cutting around it. I have Photoshop at home and erased the background in that because I wasn’t sure exactly if I would use the white paper or not. It ended up not being necessary.

You can also add some little clothing details to your pet which I did with a little bowtie for willy. Just use another image of the clothing item and apply it to your image.

How to decoupage on glass

Take your clear glass plate.

After that test position your image on the glass plate to ensure the right spot before you put the adhesive down.

Then brush on the mod podge or glue the mixture onto your plate in a thin layer. In my video tutorial, I used a sponge brush and in my photos, I used a regular brush to show you that both are ok.

Position and press down your image with the artwork facing through the glass.

All you have to do now is brush on more mod podge over the back and mouth out any bubbles and creases.
You can see very well how I did that in my video tutorial.

Set the plate aside and let it dry. After it is completely dry, take the white acrylic paint and fill in the remaining space around the image to make it appear to have a white background when turned around.

You might need two to three layers like I did with drying time in-between.

And voila, here you have your own DIY decorative pet salad plates. They are really cute. Of course not as detailed as the ones from the talented artist but they are custom nevertheless and a whole lot cheaper.

The black and white cat plate was a cheap version from H&M home and I like mine better.

And they also fit right in with the other animal plates on my kitchen wall. You also might be interested in finding out how to hang plates on a wall.

My little Willy is pretty proud of his little face hanging on the wall now with all the other cats.

Any ideas what my cats could wear?

So far we have:

• King Harry because he was so majestic.
• Lilly the chef because she loved to eat everything and anything and was always present when we cooked.
• Lucy  the princess
• Heidi the old lady (she was 22 when she died)
• And Monkey as Katniss Everdeen because she was such a good hunter.

Since this is about cats and hopefully my cat-loving followers are reading this, I wanted to tell you guys that I started catching the strays in our neighborhood to get them neutered and then released again. I just don’t want to have more poor kittens this spring. Handsome Mr. Willy above is one of the neighborhood kittens as you might remember. You can read more about him HERE and HERE.

I’m lucky enough to have another good-hearted neighbor who is doing this with me and who has been pretty successful in doing this before me already. Last Friday we caught two cats. One really big black male who is about 5 years old and one pregnant female. I’m glad they are both successfully neutered now and I’ll be moving on to more this week.

Wish me luck.

Other DIY artwork and painting tips

• what to do with old trophies (and how to repurpose them into a collage to hang on your wall)
• DIY brush stroke art
• unique DIY modern macrame wall hanging
• long macrame wall hanging with embroidery floss
• cat decorating made easy with my cat-friendly decorating tips
• how to paint flower pots