There was an article awhile ago about using a 3d printer and scanner to make a "copy" of an oil painting.
http://www.designboom.com/art/oce-3d-printer-creates-identic...
Until Photoshop filters output STL files and color 3d printers come down in price, humans win.
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.
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.
In fact, the existence of products like, say this: http://www.artinstituteshop.org/item.aspx?productId=931
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> Let me be clear- I have been to many, many world class art galleries.
Yet you claimed:
>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.
and asked:
>Is it like the same thing they put in engines to make them run smoothly?
Src: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12800067
How does claim to one visit "many, many world class art galleries" yet not know what an oil painting is?
I think you're just trolling now.
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.
[1] But not necessarily more profitable.
It does not scale at all for one-off pieces of artwork.
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.
Getting a robot to actally lay down each stroke with paint is left as an exercise for the reader. ;-)
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.
http://jivp.eurasipjournals.springeropen.com/articles/10.118...
And there is a lot of work available on brushstroke analysis for authentication purposes. Here is a pop-sci example from about 8 years ago:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/art-authentication.html
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.