The studio · Master copies & studies

Master Copies and Academic Studies — What Our Painters Can Do

These are studio pieces rather than commissions — copies of old-master paintings, portrait studies, academic drawings from casts and a wall mural — and they exist to answer one question: how good are the painters?

What these are: Studio work — training, practice and demonstration pieces
Why they are here: A commissioned pet portrait cannot show a painter's range; a master copy can
Techniques shown: Old-master layering and glazing, academic drawing, portrait likeness, large-scale wall painting
Mediums: Acrylic and oil on canvas; graphite on paper
Commissions: What we can accept depends on the rights to the source image — see our image rights policy

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Every studio says its painters are good. This page is the evidence, and it is deliberately not made of commissions.

There are more than fifty painters here. That is what makes a hundred-piece order a scheduling question rather than a capacity one — but headcount says nothing about whether any of them can draw. The work below is the part that does.

Master copies

Copying a master is how a painter learns to see: the drawing has to be measured, the colour matched, the layers built in the order the original was built. A copy can be compared against the original by anyone, which makes it a far harder test than a portrait nobody else has seen. The copies shown here are of paintings whose copyright has long expired, and they are studio work — practice and demonstration — not a catalogue of reproductions.

Academic studies

Drawings from plaster casts — the David head is the classic — are the foundation of the training our painters went through. They show construction, edge control and tonal range with no colour to hide behind, and they are the reason a graphite portrait from this studio holds together.

Wall painting

The koi mural here was painted by the studio on a wall, at a scale no easel piece reaches. It is on this page for the same reason the master copies are: it shows what the painters can hold together over several metres, with the drawing worked out at full size and no opportunity to step back and start again.

We are not taking mural commissions at the moment. What we can take at that scale is canvas: up to roughly 5 m on the longest side. Above about 2 m, freight becomes the real constraint rather than the painting, so we check shipping on the route before quoting a size that large.

What this means for your order

The painters here are the painters on your commission. The level of finish you order is what you get — Hyperreal is closest to the work on this page, Refined is where most commissions sit. Trade buyers who need to prove quality to their own customers can order a discounted first sample and hold the result in their hands.

100% hand-painted — no prints, no AI

Trade pricing from 1 piece

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One piece, or a whole project