With EveryArt (YC W12) you don't have to be afraid of commissioning art | Hacker News Reader

With EveryArt (YC W12) you don't have to be afraid of commissioning art

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174 pointsjmcannon54 comments

Easy access to spectacular concept art through EveryArt would be a big win for smaller game developers. Great concept art really helps bridge the gap from "pretty cool" to "amazing" and amplifies the inspiration driving the game concept.

Having worked on the early production stage of Blizzard's next MMO, concept art definitely seems like the most fun part of the design process, for both the artists and those who commission them. With concept art work, you can find mind-bogglingly talented people who, when you give them ideas and let them roam free, will do these face-meltingly awesome concepts that inspire you so much you just want to make huge posters of them and jump inside.

People just get so excited hiring amazing artists and seeing what they can do with few limits in place. That's what EveryArt will really have going for it.

BTW, is there's anyone who has taken on commission markets for musical groups? Been wondering for a while: http://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-service-that-allows-people-a...

Absolutely. We were our own first customers and sometimes have to restrain ourselves from blowing all our YC money on commissioning our own artists. Most of the work so far has been for the wall, but some people have commissioned pieces that they've used in a site design. No games. . . yet.

this looks great, justin! i'm looking forward to game artists hosting their work here instead of blogspot :)

I come from a family of artists so I've always hoped that we day see a world where most regular people to have nice art on their walls, at home and at work. At $1000/piece that idea is still out of reach for most people, but it's a good start.

Interestingly enough, I think you could learn a lot from tattoos. Millions of people get tattoos because it's a way to express themselves in a meaningful and unique way for a couple hundred dollars. If you can make art culture something more personal and approachable, like tattoo culture, you may unlock a huge market and make the world more beautiful to boot.

Or they could just serve the tattoo market right? As much as the name is "EveryArt" I could totally see this being a place for tattoo artists to make a name for themselves, sell commissioned works, etc.

There's loads of stuff on Deviant Art, for instance, that I wouldn't mind hanging on my walls.

The problem is the total overload one suffers when browsing around that site.

I'd totally use some kind of smart discovery service to find me cool art. But how does one algorithmize subjective visual aesthetics? De gustibus non est programmandum :)

> I'd totally use some kind of smart discovery service to find me cool art.

So find a dealer gallery you like and develop a personal relationship with them.

What year is this, 1990?

But that's not what I want. I want a better filtering/discovery mechanism for DA. There's a lot of great artists on there but it's too much work browsing, not to mention deciding.

I've never gotten a tattoo as I could never commit to something "forever" that I wasn't sure about.

I want a temporary tattoo painter. One that I can program or download art into and have it print on my body - it can remain until I am tired of it and I can delete and reprint myself as I see fit.

Maybe one day I want my whole body to be plaid, camouflage the next.

This already exists. It's called "furries".

No. Really.

See, every furry has a character or three they've come up with. Some of them are self-insertion characters - "fursonas". Some of them are not.

But not every furry can draw. And furry is a pretty visually oriented scene.

So there are TONS of people making a decent chunk of their living on lots of little commissions where they draw other people's characters.

Browse around furaffinity.net and you'll see it in action. (Warning: you will also see lots of amateur art, and if you log in and say you're an adult, you will see some really out there fantasy porn. By both amazing artists and amateurs.) A few of my friends support themselves largely, or entirely, on this.

I have used painters in China for this. For about $270, including shipping of a large tube from China to Australia, I got a 2x1 canvas. It cost more to stretch/frame the piece than it did to paint and ship it.

There is an entire village where many of the occupants are dedicated to the craft. They will copy photographs of your family, recreate old classics, emulate a sketch you did or copy an image you found on the web.

In my case, I wanted a copy of a piece that was to otherwise be €1,000 just for an unframed print, edition of 400+. I emailed a JPG, gave dimensions and the painter sent a couple of progress shots before sending it over. Unless you compare it and the original images side by side, the differences are not noticeable.

I think the demand is there. I have actually thought about building something that sits between consumers and the Chinese artists, to capitalise on the unease some might feel in sending money abroad with little idea of what might come of it. Shuffle some emails around, load the quotes a few percent, etc.

There are plenty of sites that do this. Crazy prices on the reproductions sourced out of china. overstockart.com is one of them.

Is that through a website?

Yes. The city is Dafen and you should be able to find a few options by Googling or email me for a specific contact.

... So instead of paying the original artist for a print, or asking them if they might consider a cheaper run (artists are just guessing too!) you paid someone else to counterfeit you an "original"?

You are proud of this?

The original artist is a bit above "considering a cheaper run" - originals of their work would be hundreds of thousands of dollars and long since collected. I was not buying as an investment so I could not financially justify a $1,500 (plus framing) print-out. I could not find their pieces as unnumbered prints/posters in the way that you can buy cheaper prints of classics in art gallery stores.

I couldn't buy the original or justify a limited copy and an unlimited copy was not otherwise available. I figured some money to a less privileged worker overseas at least helped someone in the art world.

All of my other purchases are generally student pieces, from early exhibitions of new artists or smaller prints.

I didn't mention being "proud of this" but I do like having the piece on my wall. You are welcome to disagree with my behaviour regardless.

I'm definitely conflicted. OTOH, people commissioning art "in the style" of more expensive artists is as old as art itself. Pixel for pixel replicas is only a difference in degree.

I think there are some grey areas within copyright pertaining to availability and probably other areas too. When family finances push priorities elsewhere and a decision is creating an opportunity for a "poorer" worker, I am often influenced by those things.

On availability, it is very common in Australia for even "I don't pirate movies"-types to torrent TV shows by episode or season because they are simply not being shown even on paid TV here and don't seem to be on the radar for the future. Meanwhile, things like Hulu/Netflix/etc are geo-blocked.

Had the artist in question made available unnumbered prints for a reasonable price or numbered prints at maybe 500 Euros, it's unlikely I would've even thought to give the Chinese painting village a shot.

That was a 2m x 1m canvas, sorry - was eating breakfast and forgot to add the units.

Another art-related idea I would like to see: take a picture of the signature on a piece of art to look up the artist. I have 3 original pieces I really like. The artists are probably complete unknowns. If such a DB could grow to world-wide that would be a great boon for art lovers and artists. I think it would shift the balance of power held by powerful art critics, making what is recognized as fine art more democratic and making it easier for talented artists to attract a following.

I actually did that this morning! The new Google image search is neat in that you can drop an image into the search box. I saw an unattributed piece on pinterest this morning, dropped it in GI and out came the artists name.

It also work to find the source of videos; just take a snapshot and drag it there.

Great suggestion, only in my case the contrast of the signatures to the backgrounds is not good, and this would be a problem with many works saved by Google as well. But it does give me the thought implementing this idea might be technically easier than I thought. Implement the saved signatures as images with the background whited-out and provide tools to easily bring a requested signature image into that state.

Yet another great example of how a relatively simple service can take out the middle man and create transparency for the parties that are adding value.

Never fails to amaze me how many of such niches could benefit from the concept of a targeted marketplace for X.

This service is a middleman. Most people just found an artist on Deviant Art and commissioned the piece directly from the artist. I have commissioned plenty of digital art this way.

This is a case where a middleman steps in and provides a service that is useful to both the artist and the customer.

A middle man is not always a bad thing.

I like it.

Wasn't this essentially happening less officially through Deviant Art?

Yep. We considered that a proxy for demand.

DA is a really interesting proxy - It's a pretty large market. I'm a RISD grad and can imagine TONS of my classmates using this. ETSY = Craft Majors, EveryArt = Painting, Illustration, Sculpture.

This is going to be huge, Best of luck!

FWIW I took notes on a panel that the DA founder gave at ComicCon last year.

http://replicatorinc.com/blog/2011/08/how-deviantart-has-cre...

Thank you!

I have no idea how the fine art world works, but when I saw the HN headline I thought of places that let individuals sell T-Shirts with their designs. So on that note, would it make sense to have a free-for-all section of the site, or a separate sister site, where anyone can join, then have them earn reputation points and those that become reputable there are candidates for you to invite to your fine-art section? That could bring a source of small revenue and source of cheap art to the bottom end of the market, as well as create a way to discover artists who are ready to move up.

This a really cool product. I'm so glad someone is tackling this space because we get requests for it at Artsicle all the time but it's really not our focus at all. Glad to see other companies looking to tear down the artificial wall between artists and collectors.

This is awesome! I had never thought of commissioning artwork previously, but checking out some of the already commissioned postapocalyptic artwork made me realize I'd love to recreate custom-made versions of scenes from my favorite science fiction or graphic novels for not much more than some random painting I could buy at Target. I'll definitely be using EveryArt in the near future!

Is there a way a user could suggest / recommend an artist for EveryArt to source? I personally follow several digital artists on DeviantArt and similar, and would love to have artists in those available to work with me through EveryArt.

I'd like to see more in terms of an artist's profile, something like a CV along with their statement. While a couple thousand dollars isn't much for art, people are still going to approach it as an investment, and as such probably would like to know where they studied, where they've shown, who represents them, etc.

On the other hand the work on the site seems kind of kitschy, so maybe you're targeting more of the decoration market?

Either way, nice concept.

You've touched on a really interesting point here, and one that we've thought about really hard. In building the company, we had to decide what sort of portfolio we wanted to represent. We were gaining the most traction with work that's often described as narrative or illustrative, and we discovered that the people most excited weren't even thinking about their pieces as investments (in the sense of future resale value). I wouldn't describe this work as kitschy, though - it's got a broad appeal that most people are able to connect with quickly. The narrative aspect is important for motivating people to commission, too - it's not as easy to commission an artist that works in a very minimal style. Even then, I don't think the kind of people that would prefer that sort of work are going to be early adopters.

You will notice that we do represent some more contemporary styles. Like any smart startup, we're measuring and exploring different niches. We'll recruit artists based on what people respond to. Moving up the ladder to more expensive and established artists that people regard as investments isn't out of the question as a part of our future.

Having said all that - we are working on including more background information in our artist profiles. Good feedback.

"... Artists get a new source of income... targeting a younger audience — people who have a little bit of money but aren’t yet connected to the fine art world ..."

Smart. The 'traditional' art world is primarily analog & conservative so targeting the younger can create a new online market. Interesting the early artists are curated but with an eye to a broader selection. An online art gallery.

Just one point of feedback on the EveryArt site: the slideshow I saw when I loaded EveryArt.com advances slides just a bit too quickly. I wanted to look at several of the examples, but I was only about 40% done "taking in" the picture.

That said, this is a great concept and I'll be passing the site along to the artists I know.

Thanks for the feedback. Sounds like others feel the same. We'll slow it down a bit.

This is great.

I've been looking for an artist to commission a piece of art that I have sketched out on paper and in my head for a while. I just didn't know who to ask. Found an artist on there who might just be the perfect fit, based on his portfolio. So this solves a real need, at least for me.

I hope it works out, for EveryArt and for my art.

Perfect! Let us know if we can be of any help along the way.

Got shot down. "Not interested" says artist. Boo!

Ahh, I saw that. I'm sorry - our artists' personalities are as diverse as their styles. We've done our best to screen for people that will work well with clients, but we will be watching closely to make sure they're all a good fit. I'm following up with an email to you now.

For the founders:

When you click on a piece of work on /browse/ it takes you directly into the "gallery view" for that piece, rather than to the artist's profile page. This is a bit jarring. I would consider taking users to the artist's profile first and letting them enter the gallery view from there.

Thanks for the feedback. It actually used to work that way, but users were telling us that they wanted to go directly to the image that the clicked on. We'll work on a happy solution.

Two more comments: I was about to email you about it when I noticed you actually have something about gift cards on your website. Make it more prominent! I think gifts would be really awesome here, but you make it so hard to find :)

Also, it'd be nice if you could somehow give an example of artists' price ranges. I don't know if I'll be paying $15, $50, $500, or $1000, and especially for someone new to art commissions, this could be a point of serious confusion.

Either way, awesome idea. I really hope this takes off. Consider me a hopeful future customer!

Thank you! I think you're right on both points.

Don't mean to hijack the thread but it's interesting how these "HN TC launch articles" have died down to such a large degree on HN. Not as many companies launching, TC not covering Y Combinator, TC just being bad, or some combination of all three?

I've been seeing a fair few of them. Seem to be a couple on the front page now that are new today, and there was a another a couple of days ago.

What a cool idea for a company! Congrats on the launch. I hope you guys kill it.

I know my wife will love it. Perfect for her to decorate our new home!

Wow, Exactly what I need at the right time. My game is progressing smoothly, but I've been having nightmares about not being able to find an artist to make game art.

Isn't this kind of what pg and rtm wanted to do as a startup before viaweb? Or something similar. Seems satisfyingly full circle if it was.

The decision not to target the Fine Arts world is wise - an egalitarian marketplace would go against everything they stand for.

I love this. Finally a place to spend the art gift card my parents gave me.

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