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The only thing that Instapainting and similar businesses demonstrates is that bad photos don't make good paintings, especially when they're paint-by-numbers cop
by jbarham 11y ago
The only thing that Instapainting and similar businesses demonstrates is that bad photos don't make good paintings, especially when they're paint-by-numbers copies of bad photos. IMHO most of Instapainting's customers would be better off applying a "painterly" filter in Photoshop to their photos and have them printed to canvas at their nearest Costco.
Paintings of photos look like paintings of photos because they're crippled by the artefacts of the source photo such as unnatural perspective (which is why the "normal" 50mm lens is a thing), inaccurate colours and clipped highlights due to the limited dynamic range of even pro-level DSLRs.
Professional painters take years to hone their craft and learn the rules of composition that make a painting look good. E.g., one of my favourite painters is the watercolour virtuoso Joseph Zbukvic. Here's a video where he quickly paints an impressionistic Melbourne street scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81w9PBZOmZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81w9PBZOmZ8. Because he's not slavishly copying the photo he's free to rearrange the composition and add elements to make it more pleasing. He makes it look easy but that's because he's one of the best.
Buying original paintings from professional artists doesn't have to be that expensive. This past weekend I attended a group art show opening in Melbourne and prices ranged from $450 to $2200 for some very nice original oil & watercolour paintings. If you can afford to live in the Bay area or most other large cities in the developed world, you can afford to occasionally pay that much for a painting.
(Most of the stuff churned out by the "contemporary art" scene can be safely ignored. At the very high end contemporary art isn't art as much as it is an unregulated private currency for the very rich to launder and move around their wealth. Most contemporary art disappears without a trace.)
- chrischen 11y ago> Buying original paintings from professional artists doesn't have to be that expensive. This past weekend I attended a group art show opening in Melbourne and prices ranged from $450 to $2200 for some very nice original oil & watercolour paintings. Yep you're right. Our creative art section at http://www.instapainting.com http://www.instapainting.com feature artists from the Bay Area as well as New York, and their prices are actually even lower than the ones you listed. They're only a little bit more costly than market rate photo to painting.
- Animats 11y ago"IMHO most of Instapainting's customers would be better off applying a "painterly" filter in Photoshop to their photos and have them printed to canvas at their nearest Costco." That works quite well, especially if you use one of the better inkjet printers with six or seven inks, print on canvas, and finish off with a sprayed clear coat. This is called "Giclée".[1] There's already an online service for this.[2] You can even see what the result will look like before you order. Price is about $30-$50/square foot. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giclée https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giclée [2] http://www.canvaspress.com/ http://www.canvaspress.com/
- chrischen 11y agoYea, we offer high quality archival canvas prints printed on demand through our sister site: http://www.amanufactory.com http://www.amanufactory.com There isn't just an online service for this, there are literally thousands.
- brusch64 11y agoWow Joseph Zbukvic is impressive. Brings back my horror art lessons in school. We had a watercolour artist as an art teacher and we had to use those big hair brushes too. Too bad I sucked completely with this brush and hated going to art class. But it's really impressive watching what this guys doing ! Thank you for the link.