Earlier quoted context omitted.
No.
Would you want one?
Not if he wants to keep travelling easy!
(It can be done, but it's more limiting and exhausting in general. Just back from three weeks in Europe with two kids under five.)
Instapainting – From $4k in debt to $32k/mo in passive revenue with no employees
271–277 of 277 posts
Re: Instapainting – From $4k in debt to $32k/mo in passive revenue with no employees
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get why it seems distasteful, but I personally thought it was pretty clever. This site thrives on good, real world examples in the home page, so it would make sense to incentivize people to agree to let the site use their examples. If it were a larger company I would probably not like it either, but I'm willing to give a pass to a very small business.
I'm surprised he didn't use the second, less-offensive wording though, it does feel weird as is.
Maybe there is a lot of value in having lots of samples. People are more likely to give permission to get out of the fee than to get a discount.
Personally I'd increase the discount to around 10% (raising the base price to compensate) and have "Allow us to use this as a sample" checked by default; but I wonder what % of people have a strong reaction like the OP here.
Re: Instapainting – From $4k in debt to $32k/mo in passive revenue with no employees
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you want one?
Not if he wants to keep travelling easy! (It can be done, but it's more limiting and exhausting in general. Just back from three weeks in Europe with two kids under five.)
I meant in a way so he can keep traveling and someone else would take care of the work for those weeks.
Re: Instapainting – From $4k in debt to $32k/mo in passive revenue with no employees
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the artist is 1 in a million, in China that would be over 1,300 people. That is still less than the number of current NFL players in the US.
What's your point? Everyone knows that very talented artists who produce original work are sometimes very richly rewarded (Jeff Koons comes to mind). But like football, most everyone else is not. This is not exploitation. FWIW the world is also full of studio musicians who have more musical talent than big name stars but get paid modestly.
1 in a million Chinese artists are rarer than NFL players, and are not richly rewarded.
Re: Instapainting – From $4k in debt to $32k/mo in passive revenue with no employees
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a missing piece of automation here still. 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 ph…
Software already exists to decompose a painting or drawing into a series of strokes (drawings are obviously easier). The examples I've seen were all 2D, but I am given to understand that 3D equivalents exist as well. Getting a robot to actally lay down each stroke with paint is left as an exercise for the reader. ;-)
All the software I've seen (and I'd be fascinated to see anything I've missed) does not work in a way (afaik) that would be useful for a robot painter.
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.
Re: Instapainting – From $4k in debt to $32k/mo in passive revenue with no employees
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Software already exists to decompose a painting or drawing into a series of strokes (drawings are obviously easier). The examples I've seen were all 2D, but I am given to understand that 3D equivalents exist as well. Getting a robot to actally lay down each stroke with paint is left as an exercise for the reader. ;-)
All the software I've seen (and I'd be fascinated to see anything I've missed) does not work in a way (afaik) that would be useful for a robot painter. 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,…
Here is a paper that shows the kind of work being done on the "reverse engineering" of brushstrokes (the field is a bit esoteric):
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.
Re: Instapainting – From $4k in debt to $32k/mo in passive revenue with no employees
#277Congrats on the success. Thanks for sharing the business story too. Disclaimer: this is not a paid endorsement. I don't know Chris. But I happen to be a customer - having bought a painting as a gift. It is framed on the wall at this moment. My only feedback. Your prices felt too inexpensive. Knowing something was handmade I would have paid more than I did. I'm sure you have researched the market and margins and all t…
I was surprised at how relatively cheap the prices are. A 48"x72" oil painting for $279 base is at least half of what I would have expected. Pushes me to want to make a purchase before the prices inevitably have to climb as demand overtakes the scarcity on the production side.
> before the prices inevitably have to climb as demand overtakes the scarcity on the production side.
This definitely seems like an area where you might expect Baumol's cost disease to operate. China labor costs are increasing steadily and there's no obvious labor pool to replace them, and as far as hand painted paintings go, there's also no obvious productivity improvements which could keep costs constant - they already seem to be painted about as fast as possible. (So Instapainting's dabbling in robot painting can't fix Baumol's cost disease because the paintings will no longer be 'handmade'.)