The hardest part was actually conveying that it wasn't just some print or photo filter, and this is something I still have difficulty with today.
Curious about whether people care about this. As somebody who takes a lot of pictures, if somebody could produce one of my photos as a painting using Photoshop that was indistinguishable (or close to it) from a person, I really don't think I'd care. From a business perspective, this seems like it would also carry the benefits of scaling better and having better quality control. You could also give the person multiple options (watercolor, oil, impressionist, etc.).
I'm sure the OP knows the market much better than I do, I'm just curious whether going with simulated paintings was ever considered and whether customers really do care about having a person paint it?
No, never. I just asked about it because I heard the term once a long time ago, but to be honest I'm note even sure what an oil painting is. Is it like the same thing they put in engines to make them run smoothly?
This was actually a question for the OP, since he has experience in it, but I'll bite.
If you use high quality paper and printing, you can make extremely high quality prints that imitate all kinds of effects like oil, watercolor, colored pencil, and sketching. I actually have quite a bit of experience in producing them, which is why I asked this question in the first place.
There are many other factors besides texture to consider. Cost, color, consistency, etc.
Painting is applying pigment to a page using a liquid which then dries after it has been applied. This liquid could be water (for watercolours), an acrylic polymer compound (for acrylic paints) or linseed oil (for oil paints).
The liquid used has its own properties which mean you can achieve different styles and textures. For instance, water colours absorb into the paper and spread out.
Oil paints are very thick and slow drying. You can layer up the paint, and even crave back through it revealing different layers. It is common to use pallet knives and spatulas to work in oil aswell as brushes.
Some artists even create work where the paint is centimetres thick on the canvas - creating work which is more of a relief than a painting.
Because you have this texture, the light interacts with the paint differently to a printed photoshop filter. There will be highlights and shadows as the light hits the painting from an angle, as you move your perspective these will change too. You can even mix paint so that pigment is more dilute and the paint ends up slightly translucent or pearlescent, this can make parts of the canvas almost glow under the right light.
There is a lot more to oil paintings than just a photoshop filter.
And there's really no comparison between the leather in a Rolls Royce Phantom and the leather in a Honda Accord, and yet somehow Honda moves hundreds of thousands of vehicles a year.
My question was not a refutation of the claim that original oil paintings are superior to prints. It was rather an honest attempt to understand the market opportunity of a business and whether the OP believes that a market for prints exists. However that attempt seemingly gave way to a forum for people here to show how much they know about art.
Let me be clear- I have been to many, many world class art galleries. I actually live less than a half mile from one. I do not dispute that there is a difference between a Francis Bacon and a Photoshop reproduction of a vacation photo from my phone. My question was how the OP figured out that making clear that the picture was not a filter and was produced by a real person was an important feature of the service. I give up.
One reason people buy paintings is because they're hand-made - and obviously so.
A print is machine-made - and obviously so. It's reproducible, so it has no obvious uniqueness.
Some people have tried making one-off prints. That never really works out, because one of the important elements in art objects is visible proof of unique human labour. A print can't supply that, even if it's a digital one-off. The labour may still be there, but it isn't visible in the way that the effort needed to cover a canvas is.
Art is a social signal of disposable capital, aspiration to social status, and ability to command effort. Having an art object legitimises an image and a buyer in a way that a print can't. It also adds a sense of permanence, which some people like when they want to make memories more tangible.
Instapainting capitalises on that by selling to people who want a painting but don't know much about art. I'd guess some of them like the idea of having a painting of a memory, while others like the idea of telling visitors that they had something painted specially.
The bell curve wins again. This turns out to be a much bigger market than the one for people who want a painting and know something about art, and very much bigger [1] than the market for people who buy expensive paintings and know a lot about art.
The idea isn't actually new, but it's possibly the first time it's been done on an industrial scale. Back in the 00s there were services in the UK selling stylised portraits for similar money. They were fairly successful, but limited by having a small pool of artists to draw from. Chinese labour has changed that and made a mass market possible.
Why are you so openly hostile to everyone being confused by your inability to differentiate between the output of a 2D printer and the 3D texture of an oil painting?
I honestly can't tell when you're being sarcastic, when you're trolling and when you honestly aren't getting something.
The market you seem to think doesn't exist absolutely does. It has been well served for well over a decade, in regional malls and more recently online.
What the OP is offering is a service above and beyond what can be achieved with a quick photoshop filter and a large format printer. They are trying to communicate that his product is qualitatively different from this - a unique, handmade piece of art. That is their entire value proposition.
This isn't about trying to produce a knock-off of a photoshop filter with cheap Chinese labour.
Oil [0] (and acrylic) paintings aren't just flat things like you get off of your high quality printer. They have a 3D texture which you can visibly discern and run your fingers over (but probably shouldn't) and feel the brush or palette knife strokes laid by the artist.
You really should get yourself to some decent art galleries; you'll then, I hope, discover there's no comparison between a hand painted or drawn picture to that produced by printer. Once you've viewed artwork produced by the human hand, prints produced by all those fancy effects and fancy papers become pale imitations.
would seem to indicate that there actually is a pretty decent market for oil painting reproductions that are [GASP] the product of a high quality printer and that you are wrong.
In other words, don't assume that just because you are an art snob who was educated at the Sorbonne and obsesses over the textures that you can run your fingers over that the entire market (or even a majority of it) is like you.
> In other words, don't assume that just because you are an art snob who was educated at the Sorbonne and obsesses over the textures that you can run your fingers over that the entire market (or even a majority of it) is like you.
No need to be rude.
I'm certainly not an "art snob", though I did study art and art history in high school over thirty years ago. And only then to escape playing football (soccer) in PE because I took A&AH as an extra subject. To be honest I was largely bored rigid, but I was, at least, clean, warm and dry and not getting tackled and kicked in the shins. However when I went to college I bumped into numerous artists and through hanging out with them the subject grew on me as a passing interest, but certainly not a snobbish obsession as you so impudently assume.
Anyway, I am just pointing out that, should you wish to inform and educate yourself a little better, if you visit an art gallery and see real works of painted and drawn art (regardless of era), you'll discover they're massively different from $18 poster prints.
I don't know what art galleries you have in Chicago so can't comment. I'm sure google and wikipedia research can help you there (and if it's a half decent gallery then it'll have a wikipedia entry).
The Art Institute of Chicago is great. Not sure if OP is from Chicago, though—the other museum they named is the Met Museum in New York. I visited both this summer (and also the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.), and they're all truly fascinating. I could spend several days in each ;)
Given that he already has the robot which can paint, wouldn't it be easy (well, doable at least :) to really paint the picture instead of printing it? There is no reason why this kind of painting should be any different from the manually produced.
There is a missing piece of automation here still.
The robot can replicate recorded movements - brush angle, pressure, timing etc.
An photoshop filter can shift pixels around to make a photo look like an oil painting.
What nobody has come up with yet (and would likely be hard to develop, or at least costly) is a way to translate a photograph, or a photoshop filter into the set of movements required to render it in physical oil paint.
Until we get 3D printers with an atom-level precision, you can't really reproduce a brush stroke with a vertical nozzle, so you'd need to somehow identify those strokes from the depth scan.
Software already exists to decompose a painting or drawing into a series of strokes (drawings are obviously easier). The examples I've seen were all 2D, but I am given to understand that 3D equivalents exist as well.
Getting a robot to actally lay down each stroke with paint is left as an exercise for the reader. ;-)
All the software I've seen (and I'd be fascinated to see anything I've missed) does not work in a way (afaik) that would be useful for a robot painter.
Photoshop filters and more advanced converters like DeepArt produce something which look like strokes, but have no concept of strokes. Illustrator convert to vector/stroke/outline uses a concept of stroke which makes no accounting for the drag and physics of a brush, and may not even by physically possible to produce.
There are, of course, some conversions which we can achieve already. We have pen-based plotters and could write simple contrast/cross hatching converters etc. But these are qualitatively different from scanning an image and converting it into the strokes for a robot arm.
Additionally, in terms of desktop graphics editors such as Photoshop and Illustrator, rest assured that Fractal Design Painter definitely had a model that incorporated (well, approximated anyway) medium, angle, brush size, pressure, direction changes, the color you were painting over, etc. 20 years ago, and the latest version of Corel Painter has added features such as particle systems and modeling individual bristles (and other features have been added in the interim).
The intent in Painter is to enable the creation of new works in a way that feels natural to artists used to traditional media (not to mention reproducing the appearance of those media), which isn't quite what we're talking about here, but hopefully this demonstrates that such models do actually exist.
> As somebody who takes a lot of pictures, if somebody could produce one of my photos as a painting using Photoshop that was indistinguishable (or close to it) from a person, I really don't think I'd care.
I think this varies per person. It's like saying that having a real luxury product is no different than a imitation. There is a certain psychic benefit you get from knowing that you have something that is real (specifically that you paid more money for) vs. machine created (or cheaper). This ironically would even extend to having a good local artist produce the painting vs. having it sent off to China (at a discount rate through a service like instapainting). Hard to put into words this concept but I am sure there is an official name for it. That doesn't mean that there isn't a huge market for knockoffs but it's a different market.
That's why I made the Thomas Kinkade reference above - basically Kinkade charged a high premium for "hand painted" works that were for the most part mass produced but touched up by a human in some places. Thus it wasn't really a true painting, but not a simple print either.
From an artistic market standpoint, both the Kinkade "hand painted" works and any work from Instapaint will have an inherent value of barely anything. Maybe $5, $2.50 at a garage sale. Thus this business opportunity, Instapaint, is a very intelligent way to take nothing of intrinsic artistic value - a family portrait - and create a demand whereby there is a worthwhile profit margin.
Art is a high "perception value" type of gambit. Instapaint is successful in its avenue, I can see that and appreciate it for what it's worth. Customers feel like they're getting a good deal, so hey, who am I to tell them what they're paying for is really worthless in the long run? That's sort of the lesson within Thomas Kinkade's success though. That dude cleaned up before his less-appealing business practices and habits eventually caught up with him. There's a line between satisfying a market and kind of becoming a shady operation. Kinkade's model absolutely proved demand for a "hand painted" type of thing.
Photos on canvas, sure. But to actually transform a photo into a picture that looks like an oil or watercolor or comic strip or what have you requires some manual use of software like Photoshop.
I'll just address the real reason- printing a high-quality print (like what you'd see on sale at an art fair) is far more expensive than exploiting cheap overseas labor. If you could produce a high quality digital print for less than $160, there would be a larger market.
Applying photoshop filters doesn't actually require any manual intervention. The process can be entirely automated and Adobe will even sell you a licence to run a fully scripted version of photoshop on a server.
There is definitely a market for posters or even high quality reproductions of artworks. There is a market for oil-paint style digital artwork, whether printed or digital. I don't believe that instapainting is trying to compete with those options. It is entirely likely that the same person would have one of each on different walls of their house, each medium has different strengths, weaknesses and roles.
The market would seem to be confirmed by the existence of the startup. Also as others may have mentioned the difference between an oil painting and a digital reproduction is quite large.
For some reason people who have responded can't grasp that a question of why an alternative service doesn't exist does not necessarily attempt to imply that there is not a market for the existing service.
i.e., asking Apple circa 2006 why they only make desktop and laptop computers and not phones would not imply that there was not a market for desktop and laptop computers.
The thing is, this market does exist, and is very well served. I've seen stalls in malls offering this for over a decade, I've seen website offering this for years.
I don't think anyone is saying that this market doesn't exist, just that this site services a completely different market.
One big aspect to painting is what happens when multiple coats of different colored paint is layered on top of each other. You could reproduce that mechanically but you would need more than a flat source image file.
Curious about whether people care about this. As somebody who takes a lot of pictures, if somebody could produce one of my photos as a painting using Photoshop that was indistinguishable (or close to it) from a person, I really don't think I'd care. From a business perspective, this seems like it would also carry the benefits of scaling better and having better quality control. You could also give the person multiple options (watercolor, oil, impressionist, etc.).
I'm sure the OP knows the market much better than I do, I'm just curious whether going with simulated paintings was ever considered and whether customers really do care about having a person paint it?