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Comment by dshankar | Hacker News Reader

This was a fascinating read. Surprised that painters have seemingly good working conditions, set their own hours, and work from home!

Just a random idea: when targeting mid-market customers, have you considered going "Watsi" style? Instead of an Instapainting storefront, what about commissioning artwork directly from painters? Display the painter's name, their photo, number of previous paintings painted, and their affordable price to commission a painting.

Effectively, you could become the Internet-version of those studios themselves.

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I'd like to see an undercover investigation. This piece ended up being a little too close to propaganda.

Well we visited both the factory style places as well as the small studios. We also talked to individual artists privately. I'm not sure what you're hoping for here.

How about: 1. turnover? 2. materials toxicity? 3. living conditions? 4. any way to enforce that what you see as fair practices stays that way once you scale way up?

We're pretty small (painting 10,000 paintings per month is a solved problem, but we're not close to that volume), so we can't really enforce anything. We didn't really detect any unhappiness with any of the smaller studios (we didn't talk to workers in the factories). According to the studio heads, they usually recruited friends and ex-artist coworkers. Right now we only work with the smaller studios since we only do custom non-mass-produced work.

I can however answer #2. Oil-based paints are in fact toxic, and known to the State of California to cause cancer. You will see the signs plastered in the oil paints aisle of Blick's and Utrecht stores. This is especially apparent when you consider the name of some colors like "Cadmium red." Most oil paints, if not all, contain lead as well.

Lead is uncommon in artist's oil paints in the U.S. One of the most widely distributed brands has lead in exactly one of the the hundred+ colors they offer. That said, don't put your oil paints or solvents in your mouth.

> This is especially apparent when you consider the name of some colors like "Cadmium red."

That's a little unfair. Using #E30022 on a website doesn't mean the website has cadmium in it, and the same is true for paint - "Cadmium red" is a color, not an ingredient list. Per Wikipedia, "The cadmium pigments have been partially replaced by azo pigments. These have significantly inferior lightfastness, but still good, and they have the advantage of both being cheaper and non-toxic."

The paragraph preceding what you quoted also had this to say: "Cadmium sulfide is not very toxic (LD50 > 5000 mg/kg) when used as a pigment, although acute exposure to cadmium vapors from welding is harmful." In the case of these workers there are many details missing (whether they're using cadmiums, whether there is more exposure risk) but at least here in the US, all cadmiums I own are real and come with datasheets such as the one below:

http://d4of2brjuv1jo.cloudfront.net/assetfiles/f4fd8b8f-8fb5...

Azo colors, from manufacturers I am familiar with anyway, name their products as such ("Azo Yellow" instead of "Cadmium Yellow").

http://d4of2brjuv1jo.cloudfront.net/assetfiles/bad43b91-5026...

Regarding CSS color names, I would hope that anyone who actually recognizes the word cadmium would be aware that there pixel is not suddenly made of zinc and that their seagreen background has not suddenly become saltwater. Now if it were the other way around, i.e. the names had always been arbitrary and suddenly someone decided it would be a great way to stick hazardous chemicals into things..!

There is at least one popular brand that does use toxic chemicals: http://d4of2brjuv1jo.cloudfront.net/assetfiles/9fffc54c-1b49...

"Toxicological information: ... The soluble cadmium content in the pigment is less than 5ppm. Only large volumes may have adverse impact on human health."

I paint. A large proportion of the pigments I use are indeed toxic, as the non-toxic substitutes are markedly inferior in both lightfastness and saturation. Lead is now quite uncommon thanks to zinc and titanium oxide pigments, but cadmium, cobalt, chromium and manganese compounds are widely used in high quality paints. In practice, this toxicity is a non-issue if you're sensible enough not to lick your brushes.

Chinese painters are probably less likely to use toxic pigments than their western peers for reasons of cost - a good quality cadmium paint is two to three times more expensive than a non-toxic substitute.

Decent working conditions, flexible hours, desirable job, in China?! That's blasphemy!

Well, the desirable job part might be stretching it...more like shitty job in a highly respected profession.

That's true, the artists that do the photo to painting aren't necessarily ecstatic about signing their names on it.

Respected?

I don't think being an artist is "respected" even in the West, much less so in China, where everybody is focused on highly lucrative professions like business, finance, and ahem government service.

Supposedly they are now child labor free. https://www.instapainting.com/blog/company/2015/04/01/no-chi...

I may be misremembering, but I seem to recall a semi indie Chinese movie a out a protagonist who happens to work for one of these kinds of shops which make art for foreign markets. It was a while ago, so don't recall title, etc.

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