Step 1 - The photo
The first step will be for us to take a look at your photo and make sure we can work with it. For the best results we need to work from a clear, well lit and above all in focus photo. Please bear in mind that as a basic rule, the better the photo we receive, the better the end result will be. As the artist is working only from the photo and needs to be able to zoom in on it to find the detail, it is extremely important that the shot is clear and in focus. As a guide, if you are unable to clearly see the colour of the person's eyes, then the shot is probably not suitable. A shot with the person's head and shoulders taking up most of the frame is really ideal. Do remember that the Warhol style portrait is about the person, rather than the situation they are in, so rather boring head on shots work far better than action shots. As the portrait will hang on your wall for many years to come, it's worth taking time to get the right photo for the artist to work from! See examples of the sort of photo we need to create the best possible portrait.
Step 2 - Composition and colours
Once we have a photo we can work with, we will then move on to address the issue of composition and colours.
Composition
This is essentially about where the head sits within the canvas. To help decide on the composition of the picture we will send back a number of crops of your photo for you to consider. Some will be close crops, concentrating very much on the face, with others showing the full face and more background. To achieve the iconic Andy Warhol portrait look, a square canvas, with a head and shoulders shot works best.
Colours
To help you decide on colours, the way we tend to work is to send you a number of original Andy Warhol portraits to consider for colour combinations. Let's face it the man was a genius when it came to colour, so it's not a bad place to start! When you've decided on the colours you would like to see, our artist starts work.
Step 3 - Your portrait
About 2 weeks or so later, we would then email you back a first draft of your Warhol style portrait, using the colours you have chosen, but also showing you how it would look using some other colour combinations. This gives you the opportunity to feed back to us and to decide on the picture that you really want, before anything is printed.
Using the dye sublimation printing process onto canvas allows us to recreate the screen printed look of the original Warhols (with their areas of dots, texture, flat colour and out of registration colours) extremely well. This process gives you a wonderful and very contemporary matt finish with the grain of the canvas showing through slightly. This looks fantastic when it's just stretched around a wooden frame and hung on the wall.
Only when you are completely happy with the portrait is it then framed according to your request, packed up and despatched to you.
In all the process should take about 4 weeks.
Which size canvas should you choose?
It is worth bearing in mind that a little bit of scale does suit these portraits. Especially with the Warhol style portraits, a bigger picture allows the artist to go into finer detail resulting in a much richer portrait.
Because the artwork is created by a Graphic artist and the canvas is then printed, the bulk of the cost for us, is the creative development (which remains the same for either a small or large portrait) rather than the material cost of the canvas and stretcher bars. For this reason the bigger canvases can in a way be though of as better value. If you look at the table below you can see how a small jump in price, gets you a huge leap in size.
Our recommended size in this style is 80cm x 80cm or above.
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