131–140 of 277 posts
I can answer any questions, whether about how to get a great Christmas present, or questions about the article!
- What's the onboarding process like for a painter?
- I read on the reddit soft-launch post that one way the business handled scaling was by printing out the photos and then painting over them. Did it turn out to be a successful strategy?
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You can get photos printed on canvas very easily already, most online photo printing services will offer this option. The hand-made one-of-a-kind aspect is pretty much the sole distinguishing feature and selling point of instapainter.
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 l…
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.
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So what is your percentage per work?
I currently put out a fixed price, and then the artists dynamically price based on the actual piece. It ranges from 5%-40% depending on the actual picture and subject matter. The plan is to fix to a fixed commission once the new marketplace is rolled out to the user facing portion of the site.
2. 5-40% quite a broad range. Who determines this percentage and what percentage does the highest volume quintile pay out?
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Have you ever seen an oil painting up close? 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.
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.
It does not scale at all for one-off pieces of artwork.
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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 effect…
Really worth getting yourself to a gallery. 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 an…
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.
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He's creating work for Chinese workers. Who are we to say what kind of pay the Chinese "should" be requesting? It's rather elitist of us to be telling them they are being taken advantage of. This is a job they've sought out and want to keep! It's the best option available to them.
> He's creating work for Chinese workers. Until I expand the market further, I wouldn't really even give myself that much credit. I think most of my business comes from replacing the established middle men with my software solution. Although it is my ultimate goal to give more artists (everywhere in the world) more business!
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I think you're coming to this with preconceived notions. Not all artists registered are "cheap Chinese labor," and that label is also disparaging to the artists that do happen to be in China, and are Chinese, including myself, as I was born in China. I wouldn't like it if you called Instapainting a piece of work produced by cheap Chinese labor (which it could very well be described since I only made about 36k salary…
You are totally correct. The Western notion of China and Chinese labor is totally wrong. Still, do you think people would care if they knew? I ask because I would have totally bought this had I stumbled onto it yesterday not knowing what I know now. I would have bought this for a friend and never thought twice about it. After reading this post I definitely would not purchase. Irrational? Maybe. Edit: I see your respo…
Well, not that wrong. Western businessmen have a very accurate notion of Chinese labor, and opportunities from lower wages / mass production there.
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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.
I don't think anyone is saying that this market doesn't exist, just that this site services a completely different market.
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I'm fairly certain it worked. It's more like the page gets lots of link, thus lots of clout, and I link to Instapainting from that page, which means I transfer some of that clout. And Google can't classify Instapainting.com as a "photo to painting" site. It just knows it's a site that contains some content. Since Yahoo.com would get better rankings even with disparate topics under the domain.
>Google can't classify Instapainting.com as a "photo to painting" site I was at a talk yesterday where the speaker from Google was saying that while pagerank is the number one input they use for search results, AI style machine learning algorithms are now number 3 so don't be so sure they don't pick up on that.
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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 pict…
Does the Art Institute of Chicago, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art qualify? 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…
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).