Layered Cardstock Pet Portrait

April 7, 2021

Hey there! It’s Kira and I am so excited to share today’s project with y’all!! This one is for all the animal lovers out there and I hope y’all love it as much as I do: a custom pet portrait!!

Supplies:

Cardstock Warehouse Cardstock Papers

Speckletone Chocolate
Speckletone Brown
Foundations White Wash
Pure White
Sno Cone
Black Licorice

Adhesive
Electronic cutting machine (Cricut used here)
Frame

I have been wanting to add some beagle art to our house since we got our puppy, Rainier, a few months ago. But the question was, what? Do I draw his portrait? Order something on Etsy? But then I started seeing all these fun, paper people portraits on Pinterest and thought, well, there’s an idea!

Speckletone Brown, Speckletone Chocolate, Black Licorice, and Sno Cone Papers with iPad and Apple Pencil

So, the first thing I needed to do was draw my portrait. I have an iPad pro and Apple Pencil, because drawing is a hobby of mine, but this could easily be done non-digitally if you have tracing paper and some basic drawing skills. I imported a photo of Rainier into Procreate and traced around it, making sure to trace around the various colors of his coat. Then to make it a little more stylized, I exaggerated his nose and gave him some cute little button eyes.

Tracing dog photo in procreate to create layered paper dog portrait

Then came the coloring. The trick to creating the layers is to figure out which parts go in front of the other parts, and sort of work your way up. So, I started with his body, creating a solid layer. Then worked my way up piece by piece, never allowing two different colors to reside on a single layer.

drawn dog portrait on iPad

Once all the layers were drawn, it was time to save them as separate .png files and transfer to my computer.

organizing layers for dog portrait

All of the layers are fairly simple, so it was quick and easy to upload them all into Cricut Design space. Once they were uploaded, I added them to my canvas and sized them to fit on an 8.5x11 piece of card stock.

layers of dog portrait uploaded into Cricut Design Space

Next, I chose my colors: Chocolate (for the ears), Brown (for the head/body spot), White Wash (for the body/face), Black Licorice (for the nose/eyes), and Sno-Cone (for the collar). And my Cricut did the cutting for me!

Once all of my colors were cut out, it was time to adhere them together. I used a combination of wet adhesive, tape runner and foam adhesive for this project.

adhering layers of paper dog portrait

The foam adhesive gave the project a much more life like feel since it added dimension to Rainier. I adhered the entire portrait onto Pure White.

Finished layered paper dog portrait

There are probably multiple ways you could frame this project, but I didn’t want to lose the dimension of it by sticking it behind glass. So I made a custom frame using some scraps of wood I had in my garage, some wood stain, a few screws and some twine to hang it.

Finished layered paper pet portrait