Sizes & formats
Sizes, budgets and formats
Small canvases for a desk, large ones for a wall, and the honest arithmetic of what each size costs.
Size is the decision most people get wrong, and it is the one that cannot be fixed later. These pages deal with the arithmetic: what fits a wall, what a budget actually buys, and how many people fit on a canvas before the faces stop reading.
Nothing here is a rule invented to sell a bigger canvas. On several of these pages the honest answer is the smaller one — a 12 × 16 in that suits the hallway beats a 24 × 36 in that swallows it.
Small oil paintings: 8 × 10 and 12 × 16
What the two smallest canvases are actually for — desks, hallways and narrow walls — and why painting small is harder than painting large.
Read moreLarge oil portraits: 30 × 40 and 36 × 48
When a canvas over 76 centimetres is the right answer: ceiling height, sofa proportions, the price jump — and how the thing actually travels to you.
Read moreAn oil painting under $500
What a hand-painted oil portrait inside a $500 budget actually gets you: three sizes, one rule about subjects, and the trade-offs that should never be
Read morePortraits of two people
Couples, parents and children, sisters: why two heads should never sit level, what two subjects cost, and how to work from photographs taken apart.
Read morePortraits of three people
Three heads need a composition, not a row: triangles, who sits and who stands, why it starts at 24 × 36 in — and who takes the middle.
Read moreA portrait of you with your pet
Priced as two subjects, combined from separate photographs if you have never been photographed together — with a word about hands, which are the hard
Read morePainting from an iPhone photo
Your phone is a good enough camera for a portrait — with caveats about zoom, filters, compression and which direction you were facing the light.
Read moreQuestions
Before you choose
12 × 16 in for a narrow wall or hallway, 16 × 20 in for a normal room. Below 12 × 16 in a single portrait reads as a photograph rather than a painting at normal viewing distance.
An 8 × 10 in at $189, a 12 × 16 in at $289, a 16 × 20 in at $389, or a 20 × 24 in single subject at $549 — which is over the line. Shipping is included in all of them.
Not meaningfully: three to five weeks either way, because drying time sets the schedule rather than the surface area. The two largest sizes are quoted case by case.
Not sure which one you need?
Send the photograph and the wall dimensions — we will tell you the smallest canvas that will work, and the date we can keep.