War Stories: A Year and a Half of Instapainting | Hacker News Reader

War Stories: A Year and a Half of Instapainting

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22 pointschrischen7 comments

The paintings are bad. Really, really bad. If you take for example the football photography turned into a painting, from the article[1], you can see even at that level of detail, that the painting is amateurish, lacks detail, and looks worse than the photograph. Their reproductions of famous paintings are even more obviously inadequate. Which is a shame, because unlike its execution, the idea itself is very good. I am disappointed that I cannot buy myself a nice reproduction of a famous painting.

[1] https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/1400/1*EqUIC15cRBw...

It's meant to look like a painting, not a photo. That being said, we're upfront about the paintings. The gallery are actual paintings directly uploaded by the artists, from actual orders. We don't retouch the samples or anything.

You either like what you see there or you don't, and we just sell what they offer.

I wanted to get a reproduction of "Hip hip hurra!" by Peder Severin Krøyer, few months ago. This is the original[1], and this is what China, in all seriousness, offfers[2]. Is it possible to get excellent quality reproductions, like the ones one sees in the caper movies, and how much would they cost?

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/PS_Kr%C3... [2] http://www.fineart-china.com/htmlimg/image-64517.html

The article was a great read and very informative.

Turning to instapainting.com was a big letdown, though: the gallery is, frankly, not very exciting (and one figures that the examples shown are among the best).

In the "custom abstract oil painting" section there's one artist that I found interesting, named Yooseon Choi (https://prods.imgix.net/e0c87263c21b1921c4d9fc9f1b65bf5597f3...).

(Also, canvas sizes are described in inches only, which effectively chases away non-American buyers; if you're shipping from China why not target an international audience?)

We simply pass on what the artists offer, both from China, as well as creative artists in the US.

"Moving forward, we look to integrate more technology and hardware (like our painting robot, or advanced machine learning) directly into the actual painting process."

The Turing test of robot painting in this instance: "would I pay the same amount if the artwork was done by a robot?"

The reason why American artists deride something like "photo to painting" (even though Tony Soprano from the Sopranos and others commission portraits all the time), is that they don't see it as creating art. And that's mostly true. People are getting photos turned to art for the effect. Any deviation from the photo right now is due to artist error, and not creative interpretation.

Adding technology to the mix means more accurate renditions, and I don't think people would care because they're getting it so that it doesn't look like a flat canvas print.

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