Pet Memorial Gifts: The One That Gives the Owner Hours With the Face

By Simon I., co-founder, Paint Kit Studio. Published June 5, 2026.

A customer named Caroline ordered a custom kit in November of last year of her golden retriever Murphy. Murphy had died the previous spring. Caroline had been carrying his collar in her purse for seven months. She sent us a photograph of Murphy from his last summer, sitting on the back porch in afternoon light, ears forward, slight smile. The kit arrived at her apartment ten days later. She did not open it for three weeks.

When she did open it, she painted Murphy across two months of evenings, slowly, in small sessions she could put down when the painting got too heavy. She sent us the finished canvas in March. The email said: "I finally got to sit with him again." She has since sent the same photograph of the canvas hanging in her hallway to nineteen friends. Several of them have ordered their own custom kits.

Caroline's email is most of what I want to tell you about pet-memorial gifts. The grieving owner does not need another object on a shelf. They need hours with the face.

What pet-memorial gift guides usually recommend, and why it falls flat

Search "pet memorial gift" and the top results are consistent. Sympathy cards, paw-print necklaces, engraved garden stones, photo blankets, memorial candles, donations in the pet's name to an animal welfare organisation. None of these are bad. Several are quite beautiful. The trouble is that they are static. The grieving owner unwraps the object, says thank you, places it somewhere visible, and then nothing happens. The object is a placeholder for the gesture of having given it.

The grief itself is not static. Grief after a pet dies arrives in waves over months, sometimes years. The owner needs something to do with that grief during the waves. A static object cannot meet the wave when it arrives at 9 PM on a Tuesday in October. The owner cries; the candle sits on the dresser; the wave moves on.

An activity meets the wave. The recipient who has a custom paint-by-numbers kit of their lost pet sits down at the kitchen table when the wave hits, opens the box, paints for forty minutes, puts it down, and gets up calmer than they sat down. We have customer emails describing this exact pattern. Across two or three months of evenings the painting gets finished, and by the time it does the owner has spent something on the order of twenty to thirty hours staring at the face they thought they had lost.

Why a custom kit is the pet-memorial product

The custom kit works because it removes the impossible part of memorial portraiture and leaves the part grief actually needs.

The impossible part is drawing the animal accurately from memory. Most pet owners cannot draw, and even those who can struggle to reproduce a specific dog's specific markings from memory when the dog is no longer there to reference. The colour matching is similarly hard; a coat that looked tan in the kitchen was actually warm yellow on the lit side and cool brown on the shadow side, and after a few months of grief the owner cannot reliably reconstruct which was which.

The custom kit handles both. You send us a photograph of the pet, taken in life. We convert the photograph into a numbered canvas with matched paints. The animal's actual proportions are on the canvas. The actual coat colours are in numbered pots. What the owner does is fill in the colour, slowly, inside the lines.

The part that grief needs is time. Twenty to thirty hours of slow attention to the face. The kit gives the owner that time in a defensible form: not "I am sad about my dog" sat staring at nothing, but "I am painting Murphy's face" sat at the kitchen table. The activity is socially legible. The painter can paint while a friend visits and they can talk about Murphy. The painter can paint while watching television. The painter can paint at midnight when sleep is not coming and the wave is loud.

What to know before you order it as a gift

A few things that customer-givers have figured out over the last couple of years, that we did not put in the packaging.

Choose a photograph from life, in good light. The best memorial photographs are taken at eye level (not from above looking down on the pet), in natural light (a window, a porch, an afternoon walk), with the pet's face clearly visible and the markings not in deep shadow. If your friend has shared a photograph of their pet on social media that you remember loving, that is often a strong candidate. If you do not have access to a usable photograph, ask the recipient or a mutual friend.

Give the recipient privacy about the timing. Do not expect the kit to be opened in the first week. Some recipients open it the day it arrives and paint the first session that night. Others leave the brown shipping box on a counter for a month before they are ready. Both responses are normal. Do not check in on the painting's progress; let the recipient surface it when they want to.

Include a short, written note. Two or three sentences. What you remember about the pet, what you wished you had said in the moment, why you chose this gift. Handwriting matters here; a printed card lands differently. The note is what tells the recipient that you understood the gift was about Murphy, not about the colour palette.

Acrylic forgives the painter. The Smithsonian Museum Conservation Institute notes that acrylic paint "dries" by evaporation of solvent of water and that acrylic emulsion films will always be soft at room temperature (Smithsonian MCI). The fast drying means the painter can return to a section the next evening, see the colour clearly, and adjust. For a memorial painting, where the painter's hand may not be steady on the first pass at the eyes, this matters. Acrylic lets the painter paint Murphy's eyes again the following night without losing the work underneath.

The painting often becomes a permanent fixture. Most of our memorial-kit customers tell us the canvas hangs in the spot where the pet most often sat. The hallway where Murphy used to wait by the door. The wall above the couch where the cat used to nap. The kitchen window where the dog watched for the school bus. The painting takes over that physical location in a way no other memorial gift does.

Other surfaces if a custom kit is not the right move

Not every situation wants a custom kit. Some recipients are not painters by temperament; some grief is too fresh; some pet relationships were complicated. Three alternative paths.

A stock kit of the pet's species. If the recipient lost a labrador and we do not have a perfect custom-photograph candidate, our Labrador Lake Portrait or any breed-matched stock kit gives them the painting experience without the emotional fragility of a literal portrait. The recipient paints a labrador that is not Murphy but is labrador-shaped, and the absence is somehow easier to sit with.

A landscape from the pet's life. If you know the trail the dog hiked, the beach the cat watched birds from, the porch the rabbit napped on, a custom landscape kit of that place is a quieter version of the memorial. The pet is not in the painting. The pet's world is.

A gift of materials, no kit. If the recipient is already an artist and the kit framing would feel reductive, a set of acrylic brushes and a canvas, with a note, lets them paint the pet in whatever medium fits their hand. We do not sell this configuration as a kit; you would assemble it from an art supply store. The point is the materials and the permission to use them.

What recipients say after the fact

The note Caroline sent in March, the "I finally got to sit with him again" email, is the version of the response we most often receive. There are others. One customer told us the kit was the first thing she had been able to look at directly for three months without weeping; the act of choosing a colour for a numbered patch was the first decision-making her grief had let her do. Another customer painted a custom kit of her cat across a single weekend, the weekend after the cat died, and described the painting as "the only good thing I did that month".

Paint-by-numbers was designed in the 1950s for a different purpose, but it has turned out to be unusually well-suited to grief work. Smithsonian Magazine has written about the original design intention (Smithsonian Magazine, "Paint by Number"). The kit was meant to give post-war office workers a productive evening activity. Six decades later it gives grieving pet owners a structured place to put their hands. The same mechanism (small decisions, defined zones, no drawing required, fast acrylic) handles both.

If you want to order one

The custom kit turns a photograph into a numbered canvas in about a week. Upload one good photograph of the pet, at the resolution your phone takes; we handle the rest. The kit ships in a brown box that the recipient can keep or recycle; we do not gift-wrap by default but we will if you ask. The price is $34.95 for the custom version. There is no expedited shipping for grief, and we do not advertise one; the kit takes the time it takes and the painting takes longer than that. Both are appropriate to the situation.

If you would rather pick from a stock subject, the dogs collection and the cats collection have stock portraits across breeds. Choose by silhouette, not by exact match; the recipient will fill in what they need.

The gift you are giving is not a kit. The gift is the next thirty hours the recipient gets to spend with their pet.

A memorial portrait is one of the most meaningful of our adult paint by numbers kits.

You can also start from any design in our paint by numbers kits.