Sudbury, Ont. artist creates more than 10,000 zombie portraits over a decade

Zombie portraits from Sudbury A Sudbury artist's shared fascination with zombies continues as Rob Sacchetto takes zombie portrait orders from around the world.

Artist Rob Sacchetto has been creating zombie portraits for more than a decade now, and he said that the number of people showing interest across the world has blown him away.

Sacchetto began drawing dinosaurs and monsters at a young age. Over the years it progressed into more horror-type portraits, something that he discovered are in high demand.

“The portraits actually invented the first service, it didn’t exist before 2006,” Sachetto said. “A friend of mine who was a webmaster at the time said “let’s build a website and see if this works” and literally overnight it blew up. We were sort of deluged with orders and I basically had to quit my job to keep up with the amount of portrait orders we were getting in.”

Sacchetto said that he’s created roughly 10,000 portraits since he created his own business, ‘Zombie Portraits,’ and his customers are from all over the world.

“I’ve done portraits as far as Korea, Russia, Australia, Tasmania, like literally all over the world,” said Sachetto. “A lot from the United States. People in the states are into the horror stuff and Halloween stuff.”

Aside from the single zombie portraits, Sacchetto said that one of the most popular photos he receives are from weddings.

“Weddings have been huge. I’ve done probably a thousand or more wedding zombie portraits over the years,” said Sacchetto. “A couples’ parents might not let them do a zombie themed wedding but they might be into it, so they’ll get a zombie portrait of their wedding because they want that image but they can’t maybe do it for the actual wedding itself.”

Sacchetto creates between four and five portraits on a daily basis, and each piece of artwork takes just over four hours to complete.