Changing Portraits

Eight old portraits and their ghoul twins. The first version is the painting as The Met photographed it, cropped or padded to the 4:5 shape of an 8 x 10 frame. The second is the same painting with the face gone grey-green, a skull showing faintly through it, glowing eyes, foxing and a few hairline cracks. Everything else, the background, the clothes, the nameplate, stays put, so the two line up for a swap, a slideshow or a lenticular flip. Our guide to haunted portraits and mirrors covers all three.

What’s Included

Pair	Painting	Artist, date	Full-size JPGs
1	Portrait of a Woman (the Met’s black-and-white photograph)	Charles Willson Peale, ca. 1775	portrait, ghoul
2	Portrait of a Man (the Met’s black-and-white photograph)	Samuel Lovett Waldo, ca. 1820	portrait, ghoul
3	Portrait of a Woman	Jean Marc Nattier, 1753	portrait, ghoul
4	Portrait of a Woman	Rembrandt van Rijn, 1633	portrait, ghoul
5	Portrait of a Lady	Gerrit Duyckinck, ca. 1710	portrait, ghoul
6	Study of a Woman’s Head	Jean-Baptiste Greuze, ca. 1780	portrait, ghoul
7	Portrait of a Man	Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin, 1797 to 1798	portrait, ghoul
8	Portrait of a Man	Rembrandt van Rijn, 1632	portrait, ghoul

• Letter PDF: a contents page, a page of instructions for the three ways to make a portrait change, then each picture at 8 x 10 inside crop marks with a brass nameplate, portrait first, ghoul second.
• 5 x 7 PDF: the same sixteen pictures edge to edge for 5 x 7 photo paper, with the nameplate on a band under the picture.
• Print-friendly versions (-print): white margins instead of black. The pictures themselves don’t change.
• JPGs: each picture at 1800 x 2250 pixels (4:5), without the nameplate, for interlacing software or a digital frame.

Where the Pictures Come From

Every base image is from The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access collection, released under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). The ghoul overlays are drawn by Hallowmix, and the Met has not reviewed or endorsed the altered versions. Each page carries its own credit line. Pairs 1 and 2 are paintings the Met shows online only in black-and-white photographs, so those pairs are monochrome. Pairs 4 and 8 are oval Rembrandts, padded at the sides with dark ground to reach 4:5; the rest are cropped slightly. We chose unnamed sitters and study heads only, so no real, named person is turned into a ghoul, and left out children and mourning portraits.

Printing

Print at 100% (“Actual size”), not “Fit to page,” on matte paper, and print both pictures of a pair with the same settings so they line up. Cut the letter pages on the crop marks for an 8 x 10 frame. The 5 x 7 file fills the page, so use your printer’s borderless setting on 5 x 7 photo paper.

For a lenticular flip, interlace the two JPGs of a pair, not the PDF pages. Start with a lighter pair (the Nattier, the Greuze or the Saint-Mémin drawing): the sheet maker DP Lenticular warns that “really dark colours as a background” obscure the flip, and the two Rembrandts sit on near-black grounds. The guide has the pitch test and the rest of the steps.

Pairs With

• Vintage Halloween Prints for real period Halloween art on the same wall
• Haunted Portraits and Mirrors for lenticular flips, screens and two-way mirror film
• Creating a Haunted Hallway for where to hang the portraits
• Gothic Elegant Party Blueprint for a Victorian parlor to hang them in