A word on timing before anything else. A memorial canvas given in the first weeks after a death usually lands badly. It asks the person to sit for eight or ten hours with the face of someone they have just lost, at a point when they are mostly trying to get through the afternoon. Given six months later, or on a first anniversary, the same object is often welcome. If you are unsure which it is, wait. Nobody has ever regretted waiting.
The other thing worth saying plainly: painting one of these is slow, and the slowness is the point. It is several evenings spent on one face rather than a card signed in thirty seconds. That is either what you want or it is not.
The photograph decides almost everything
A memorial kit is a custom kit, so the whole thing rests on the picture you send. We trace the photograph into numbered regions and mix the paints to match it, which means the tracing can only be as good as what it is tracing.
What works: the face filling a good part of the frame, taken in daylight or near a window, eyes in focus, no heavy shadow across one side. What does not work: a face twenty metres away in a group shot, a phone screenshot of a printed photo, anything taken at night with a flash. Old photographs are usually fine even when they are grainy, because grain flattens into regions perfectly well. What defeats the tracing is not age, it is size and shadow.
If the only photograph you have is a difficult one, send it anyway and we will tell you what the canvas will and will not hold. We wrote up the specifics in what makes a good photo for a custom kit, and there is a practical version for photographs you are taking now in the photo guide.
Order through the custom kit page. Prices run from $19.95 for the 12x12 inch version to $64.95 at the largest size and highest colour count. For a face, take the 16x20 inch canvas at 48 colours, $44.95. Fewer colours than that and skin tones collapse into flat patches, which is exactly the failure you do not want on this particular painting.
Faces are the hardest thing in the kit
Worth knowing before you start rather than halfway through. Skin is made of a dozen colours that differ only slightly, and the regions are small and irregular. Paint the darkest regions first and work up, resist the urge to tidy the edges between tones, and let the whole face dry before you judge it, because wet acrylic reads several shades darker than dry. The portrait guide goes through it properly.
Anyone who has not painted before should do one ordinary landscape first. It costs $24.95 and three evenings, and it means the memorial canvas is not also your first attempt at holding a brush.
When a person is not the right subject
Often the better canvas is a place. The house, the lake, the walk they did every Sunday. It carries the same weight without putting a face on the wall, which some households want and others very much do not, and it is a far easier painting.
Among the stock designs, Lonely Forest Bench and Mystical Pathway are the two that people buy for this. Alpine Lake Sunrise and Lighthouse at Sundown work if the association is with water. Winter Pathways suits a January anniversary better than anything bright would.
If the place is a real one and you have a photograph of it, the custom route applies here too and is usually the stronger choice.
Afterwards
A canvas that is going to hang for years should be sealed. An unvarnished acrylic surface picks up dust and finger marks and cannot be cleaned without lifting paint. A matte varnish takes twenty minutes and is the difference between a painting that lasts and one that looks tired in three years; the sealing guide covers which finish to use.
Every kit ships with the canvas, numbered acrylics, three brushes and a printed reference. Processing takes one to three business days, delivery seven to fifteen. If an anniversary is the deadline, order a month out. The thirty day guarantee covers the kit if it is not what you hoped for, with a prepaid return label and a full refund including original shipping.
