We paint portraits
from your photographs.

Portraits of women, men, boys, girls, babies, horses, cats, dogs, houses, cars.
Since 1993 we paint what is precious to you.

All those years our basic principle remained unchanged:
You only pay for the portrait if it matches your expectations.
And for normal orders you don't have to pay a deposit.

Have a look at our samples and find out if what we make is what you like.
Product

Technique
We apply black graphite powder with brushes on paper to paint the portrait from your photograph. we use a wide variety of brushes. All nuances between black and white can be made this way.

Size
30x40cm (11.8 x 15.75 inches) is our standard size. Smaller sizes are possible (minimum size: 18x24cm).
We do make larger sizes with a maximum of 100x150cm (40x60 inches). Ask for a quotation.

Finishing
After the customer's approval of the portrait we finish it with fixative so it will fade nor smudge.


More
In Manila where our studio is located, they call it a charcoal portrait. In fact no charcoal is used. We paint the portrait with powder: deep black graphite that is quite different from the powder of charcoal sticks.

The artist paints with brushes varying in size. An eraser is frequently used to make light nuances in dark areas. Since we work out details very precisely it is a time-consuming way of working. The technique matches very well with the Asian way of life. Philippinos have the patience to work out all the details very precise. In Metro Manila a city with about 15 million inhabitants there are hundreds of charcoal artists, maybe a few thousand.

We have a slideshow for you: seven stages of a portrait of a man and another slide show of the nine stages of a portrait of a couple. It is meant for people who think we make the portraits with a computer program (we don't!)

We are a 'one product company'. We only make this type of portraits.

The main reason is that it takes years to master this technique on a high level.
We work with highly skilled specialists. We are good in it, we have all the expertise working on a professional level since 1993. We know this type of portrait inside out.
Therefore we decided long ago to focus on this product.

It is the only way for us to have the 100% satisfaction guarantee: maintain our high quality by focussing.
There is Another reason to not work in colour.
With our type of portraits you only judge for:
- likeness and
- professional quality.
If we offer coloured portraits our customers will judge about the colours. If the monitor of the customer is not calibrated the colours an the screen will not match the real colours. The percentage of non-calibrated screens may be very near to 100%.
So for the time being we leave it this way.


In short

Portraits International
founded by a Dutchman in 1993. The studio is in Manila, the management in Zaandam.
more about us
 
All-in price: £ 69 per head, person, pet, horse or object. For more than one head on the same portrait, there is an additional charge of £ 47 per head/unit. Payment by Paypal (+/+ 4%) or bank transfer.
For normal orders no deposit has to be paid. You only pay if you are satisfied.
more about pricing    more about deposits
 
Product: charcoal portrait.
Black graphite powder with paint brushes applied to water colour paper. Standard size
30x40cm (11.8 x 15.75 inches).
more about the product
 
Delivery time: about 3 weeks
We accept rush orders where we deliver a high resolution scan of the painting within 4 working days. You can print it as a voucher for the real portrait.
more about delivery times
The price is £ 69 per head, pet or object.
For more than one head on the same portrait, there is an additional charge of £ 47 per head/unit.
Prices include costs for shipping and packing and Dutch VAT of 6%.

We may charge additional costs for special requirements. If that is the case we will send you a quote for the extra work before we take the order in production.


For rush orders we charge £ 10.
We take your order in production right away.
Courier service from Manila to your door costs £ 35.
More about delivery times.


You only pay if you like the portrait.
More about the 100% guarantee.


delivery time:

3 weeks for normal orders with regular registered mail. In November and December you have to reckon with 4 weeks.

2-4 working days for a printable high resolution scan if you ask for a rush order. 2 weeks later you receive the real drawing.

6-8 working days for a rush order with courier service.
guarantee

You don't have to buy the portrait if the likeness or the quality is not in line with your expectations.
We send you a scan of the portrait. You can then approve it or ask for adjustments.
If we do not manage to make a portrait that satisfies you, you can cancel the order. If we did not ask you upfront for a deposit, you do not pay any costs when canceling.

If you paid a deposit you lose it when you cancel the order.

We may ask a deposit for:
procedure

In general we recieve your order through the order forms on this site.
You can sent us digital photographs with the form for digital orders or you can inform us that you will send us printed photographs by post.
If everything works well you will get a answer from a mail robot within a minute after you submitted the form. It tells you we received your order.
We will send you the next working day a confirmation of your order. It will also describe this procedure.

If you do not receive this confirmation than please contact us.

After you received our confirmation it goes on as follows:

If you are not content with the result you can tell us what you want to be changed. If we think we can adjust the portrait the way you want it, we will work on it to make it better. Within a few days you will have a second scan to evaluate. In high season it can take a week before you get the 2nd version.

If the second version is again not what you had in mind you can cancel the order without any costs.
We can give this guarantee because less than 3% cancels the order.

If you inform us that the portrait is OK then it goes on as follows:



You can pay with Paypal or transfer the money to our bank account in the Netherlands:
65.35.57.701 (ING Bank)
IBAN number : NL8114.94.299.B01
ascription: Lebam Beheer B.V. Castricum, The Netherlands



No deposits for normal orders.

We can however ask a deposit in the following cases:

Of course deposits will be deducted from the total amount to be paid. But deposits are not refundable. In case you do not buy the portrait, the deposit will not be refunded.

Ordering is easy.

You can send us your digital photos by email or printed photos by regular post.
Do not send us prints of digital photo's, send us the digital images by email instead!

For digital images fill in this form.

If you will send us printed pictures by post, please fill in this form.

About us

Information about address, registration Chamber of Commerce, and bank accounts can be found at contact.

Portraits International, history in short.

September 1993 Tom Klinkhamer, consultant in the financial industry, decided to start something completely different.
Together with a few friends a portrait company was launched: Portraits International a Philippine Corporation.
The idea was simple:
People bring a photograph to a shop. Portraits International makes a portrait in a low wage country and 3 weeks later the customer can get the portrait in the shop.

We choose Manila since it had 9 million inhabitants in 1993 of which most did speak English quite well.
Our first employee was the local artist Rick Javier. He became the manager of our Manila office in 1996, responsible for quality control and daily management of the studio.

The company was shocked at May 6 in 2006. Rick was playing basketball near his house. In the time-out he drunk a glass of water and then he had a cardiac arrest. A strong 42 year old friend and partner died all of a sudden.
Rick has been 13 years with us, made thousands of drawings and was a very dedicated husband, father and business partner. It is hard to believe we have to go on without him.
His eldest daughter Rillet runs the Manila office now, assisted by Rick's sister Rizalina and our most experienced artist Gil Ramirez.

From selling through shops to direct sales through the Internet

In 1993 we did not sell through the Internet because hardly anyone used the web.
We sold through shops.
Big distributors in the Netherlands were:
- Kodak
- FotoQuelle
and in the UK:
- SupaSnaps

We sold through shops until 2004. Then we switched to direct selling through the Internet. Only FotoQuelle still sells our portraits through shops. Over 80% of our business comes from direct sales, straight to the consumer.

Sites of Portraits International, Portretspecialist and Klinkhamer Portretten.

We now have 4 sites in the Netherlands:
- www.de-portretspecialist.nl
- www.portrettekening.nl
- www.portretspecialist.nl and
- kinderportret.in-opdracht.nl

2 sites in Germany:
- www.portraits-nach-fotovorlage.de
- www.portrait-nach-fotovorlage.de

2 sites in the UK:
- www.portrait-from-photograph.co.uk and
- www.portraits-international.co.uk

1 site in the US:
- www.portraits-international.info

There are 5 sites under construction:
- www.portraits-international.com
- www.portraits-int.com
- www.portrait-portret-retrato.com
- www.portret.biz and
- free-portraits-gratis.portret.biz



Other sites will be launched this year in France, Belgium and Spain.
We will also launch a site for world-wide selling.

Our mission is a steady growth where we can maintain our high quality standards.







Contact

BK-Art
Portretspecialist
Anna Paulownastraat 30
1901 BV Castricum
The Netherlands
telephone: +31 639201776


Registration Chamber of Commerce Castricum
number: 37072487

VAT number (Netherlands):
NL8114.94.299.B01

Bank Account:
ING Bank
65.35.57.701


You can mail us at:
portretplaats, then add the well-known @, followed by gmail.com
News and thoughts

We draw houses too.
March 26, 2007. A week ago a prospect asked if we draw houses. Yes we do.
We realised that we did not have any sample of a 'house portrait' on this site. Therefore we made a drawing of one of the most famous Dutch tourist attractions: De Zaanse Schans.
It is only a few miles away from our office. It is an open-air museum that shows old beautiful houses and mills from the region.

sample of a charcoal drawing of old wooden houses

It is a nice place especially out of season when there are not too many visitors. To walk around at the Zaanse Schans on a Sunday morning in the winter is great experience.

This page is now in XHTML strict.
March 15, 2007.
Today we converted this page to xhtml strict. It tooks us about half an hour.
It is said that search engines like it when a page is complete in line with the strict rules of xhtml 1.0.
This page now validates as faultless with the validator of w3.org.

Looking for excellent charcoal drawings I found the other "victim of copyright violation".
February 14, 2007
We registered a domain lately:
www.charcoal-portrait.com.
The idea is to make it a site with extensive information about charcoal portraits (in the fine and detailed style as we make them).
Three hours of roaming the internet in search for charcoal work as good as ours our better did not seem to bring much, but....
I found the site of Lopez located in the Araneta Shopping Mall, just a few miles away from our studio in Bago Bantay. It made me smile, I have been there so many times.
A few years ago X-mas time was almost killing for us. It was hard to get enough good qualified artists to get rid of the extreme work-load.
Therefore I was always in Metro Manila in the high season going around to find artists. One of the places where I often went was Araneta in Cubao, Quezon City. Many freelancers from there helped us through the Christmas season.
I looked at their gallery and saw the good drawing of the woman on the beach.
I have quite a good memory for images, especially portraits. This woman at the beach is one of those I won't forget. I saw it at the site of a swindler lately together with images they stole from us. you can read about that story here.

I realised that Linda and John Wolverton who used our images without permission to fool potential customers, stole images too from a studio just a few miles away from ours!
So remember, images so good that they might be stolen are made in Quezon City, Philippines!
You can buy them here or at Lopez's site.
By the way, the site of the Wolverton's did not survive their own business practice.
At the moment the site cannot be reached.


this site is totally renewed
February 9, 2007
Today, very early in the morning we removed all the pages of this site and replaced it with the set of pages you are using now.
In every country we want to have at least two different sites.
We build this one based on the lay-out of www.portraits-international.info our site in the USA.
We hope you enjoy this site.





About this site

This site is designed en developed by Tom Klinkhamer in Februari 2007. It is based on the design for www.portraits-international.info, our site for sales in the US.

Copyrights of lay-out, text and images are held with Klinkhamer Portretten in Zaandam (the Netherlands).
Images can not be used without explicit permission of Klinkhamer Portretten.

If you have any remarks do not hesitate to contact us.
Thanks for your visit.

This site is strict XHTML.
You can validate it by clicking on the link.
To go back here after the validation, use the back button.

Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict
links   main    our sites    relatives    friendly sites   photographers
Thumbnails of our samples.   Use the scrollbar to see all thumbnails.
Click on a thumbnail for the large image. home
charcoal drawing: a little boy from Edam. portrait of a dog, painted from photograph portrait of a pregnant woman with her son charcoal portrait of Julia Roberts click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail click this thumbnail