The Digital Mockup, Explained: Approving Your Portrait Before It Is Painted

Every commission we take passes through one step that most first-time buyers have never heard of, and it is the step that decides whether the finished painting ends up on the wall or in a closet: the digital mockup. It costs you nothing, takes us a few hours, and settles every expensive decision — who is on the canvas, where the crop falls, what the background does — while it is still free to change. Here is exactly what a mockup is, what it can and cannot tell you, and how to review one properly.

What a mockup actually is (and is not)

A mockup is a flat digital composite. Your photograph — or photographs, if two files are being combined — is placed on a canvas at the exact size and ratio you are buying, cropped where the final crop will fall, with the background simplified to the tone we intend to paint. It is built in software in a few hours, and it looks like a clean, slightly graphic version of the finished picture.

It is not a painting preview. Brushwork, the texture of oil over canvas, the warmth a varnish adds — none of that exists yet, and any studio that promises a photo-real preview of brushwork is selling you something else. What a mockup does show is the set of decisions that are expensive or impossible to reverse once paint is on the canvas: composition, canvas size, subject placement, crop point and background tone. Those are the five things that make people regret a portrait, and the mockup settles all five before a deposit is spent on paint.

What the mockup locks, and what it leaves open

The left column is where buyer’s remorse lives. The right column is where a good painter earns the fee, and it is why we ask you to judge the mockup on layout, not on whether the digital file looks like an oil painting — it does not, and it is not meant to.

The sequence around it

• Day 0. You send photographs through the quote form. We reply with questions the same day — canvas size, who is in the frame, anything the picture is meant to say.
• Within 24 hours. A mockup for a single photograph. Composites of two or more files take about 48 hours, because the files have to be balanced against each other first.
• On your approval. Payment, and the painting starts. From first brush to finished canvas is three to five weeks — oil dries between layers, and no honest studio skips that.
• At the finish. You receive a photograph of the real canvas and one free round of adjustments. If the painting is genuinely off, we repaint it — that policy is written into how commissions work.
• Shipping. Three to five business days in transit, rolled in a tube. Rush delivery is $90 and compresses the whole schedule to about three weeks.

When two photographs become one canvas

The most useful thing a mockup does is make compositing safe. A family member who has passed away, a couple photographed years apart, a child added to an older picture — combining files is a $60–$70 addition, and it works only when three conditions hold: the light comes from the same direction in both photographs, the faces were shot at a similar distance and lens, and the background can be repainted rather than kept. If any of the three fails, you want to find out on a flat digital file, not three weeks into oil. The mockup shows both faces on one canvas at real scale, and you judge whether they belong together before the combination costs anything beyond the fee itself.

How to review a mockup in ten minutes

1. Face size first. A face needs at least 2 in of height on the finished canvas to read across a room. On 16 × 20 in with one subject that is about 3 in; on a 30 × 40 in with four subjects it may be 2 in. If the faces look small, the honest fix is a bigger canvas, not more detail.
2. The crop. Head-and-shoulders, chest, waist or three-quarter. Move your eyes to where the frame cuts off. A crop through a joint — elbow, knee, wrist — always looks accidental.
3. Background against your wall. If you know the wall colour, hold the mockup up to it on a screen. The two-to-three value separation rule and the four standard grounds are in the background guide.
4. Light direction. Every subject on the canvas must be lit from the same side. In a composite this is the failure that slips through.
5. The ten-year test. Look for anything that dates the picture: a logo, a phone in a hand, a haircut you will not recognise in a decade. Everything in the mockup gets painted.
6. The wall arithmetic. The canvas should span two-thirds to three-quarters of the furniture beneath it. The numbers are in the framing and hanging guide.

Change requests: what is free and what costs

Before you approve the mockup, changes are free: recropping, moving a subject, toning the background, swapping which photograph is used. Approval is the switch — after it, the cost structure changes.

• Adding a subject adds $90 to $360 depending on canvas size — $110 on a 16 × 20 in, $270 on a 24 × 36 in. Every person, pet or horse counts as one subject; the full grid is on the custom portraits page.
• Changing canvas size re-prices the commission at the new size’s row. Nothing else is charged.
• Swapping the photograph after painting has started restarts the clock. That is not a fee problem but a time problem: three to five more weeks. This is why the 500-pixel face minimum and the rest of the photograph rules in the reference photo guide are worth reading before you send files.
• Adjustments to the finished painting are covered by the one free round — a tie recoloured, a shadow softened. Structural changes after completion are a new commission, and we will say so plainly.

If a studio will not show you a mockup

Paint-first workflows still exist: you pay, they paint, you see the result. Sometimes it works. What it removes is your only cheap chance to say “the crop is wrong”. If a studio cannot produce a composite of your photograph at the size you are buying, it also cannot reliably composite two photographs, match a background to your wall, or tell you honestly whether your file supports 30 × 40 in. Those are the same skill. The ten questions that separate a real studio from a print mill are in our painter-selection guide, and the willingness to mock up before payment is the shortest one to ask.

What a commission costs

The mockup is part of the price, not an upsell — at every size, for one subject or six. Compositing photographs is the only flat addition, $60–$70, and you see the result before you pay it.

The short version

• A mockup is a digital composite that locks crop, size, subject placement and background — the five decisions people actually regret.
• You see it within 24 hours of sending photographs (48 for composites), and it is free.
• Review it on layout, not on brushwork: face height, crop point, background value, light direction, the ten-year test.
• Changes before approval are free; adding a subject afterwards costs $90–$360; swapping a photo after painting starts adds three to five weeks.
• A studio that will not mock up before payment is telling you something. Listen.

If you have photographs and want to see what they look like at real canvas scale, send them through the quote form. The mockup comes back within a day, and you decide with your eyes, not on trust.