Colm oil painter whose work on realistic portraits of people and animals

Colm is a classically trained oil painter whose work focuses on realistic portraits of people and animals, along with custom commission requests from clients around the world. After posting the result of a request from a reddit user to paint his dog in “dapper clothes”, he soon became inundated with commission requests for his “Pets as People” paintings. To date, he has painted over 100 hundred pets as warriors, kings, admirals, generals and even movie characters. So how do they all come to life?

“The process varies from customer to customer”, explains Colm. “Sometimes the client has a clear image in their mind of what period or style they want their pet depicted in, whereas others just leave it to my imagination: It’s always a collaborative process which I really enjoy”. “I use software like Photoshop to create the reference image and swap the pet in, and then paint from that”.

Each painting takes around 30-40 hours depending on the complexity involved, before being dried and shipped out. “The older period pieces from the Renaissance take the most time as there can be a huge amount of detail in the clothing and backgrounds”, he said. While these are the most time consuming and difficult to complete, they are the most satisfying to paint and it’s really fun to make an animal fit to the original painting and to bring happiness to my clients”, he concluded. The end result is an often spectacularly detailed and humorous anthropomorphization of people’s beloved pets. ~ oilmasterC