Layered Cardstock Pet Portrait

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 and dog 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! 

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.  

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. 

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

You can export all the layers all at once by following these steps:

Click the layers icon in the top right corner. Scroll to the bottom of your layers and de-select the checkbox in the “background color” layer, and your photo layer if you added one. This will make your PNGs transparent. 

Then, go to the wrench icon, click the “share” tab at the top, and then in the second section labeled “Share Layers” click on "PNG files." This will export all of your layers as individual PNGs all at once. They should have a transparent background, and you can upload them to your Cricut directly. If your images still have a white background, you can still upload them to Cricut and just de-select the background when you are uploading them.

All of the layers are fairly simple, so it was quick and easy to upload them all into Cricut Design space. I uploaded the transparent PNGs directly, and did not convert them to SVG. Once they were uploaded, I added them to my canvas and sized them to fit on an 8.5x11 piece of card stock. Make sure you "select all" of your pieces before you resize your drawing so the proportions stay the same. 

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. 

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.  

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.  

Thank you so much for stopping by! I hope you guys enjoyed this project and I can’t wait to try this technique on our other pets!  

Follow us on Instagram and Facebook for more paper goodness, and tag us in your creations using #cardstockwarehouse to be featured on our Insta! 

You can also find more inspiration from me on my Instagram!  

Kira 

Instagram: @kira.gets.crafty

YouTube: Create. Craft. Repeat.