For the real do-it-yourselvers
Are you veiwing these on a 60" High Def LCD? 
I don’t see the overpainted Ford logo, or the remnants of a cropped background through the windsheild. :dubious:
Of course I’m veiwing this stuff on a crappy 17" monitor.
Not that you’re wrong, or that I’m right - I just can’t see what you can.
I do have quite a large monitor here, but here is an enlarged comparison of the license plate - it’s not glaringly obvious, but you can see a dark oval patch underneath the ‘H’ of ‘SHELBY’, as well as another dark oblong strip at the top corresponding with the top bar that bears the name ‘Ford’
And here’s an enlarged comparison of the windscreen - see in the photograph, there’s a light-coloured vertical feature that belongs to a palm trunk in the background.
Now it’s possible with the latter of these that an artist working in paint would duplicate the feature on the windscreen without noticing that it belongs to a background feature, but I doubt it - and taken together with everything else, there’s just no way these pictures are genuine from-scratch paintings.
Also, just compare the license plate to the rest of the picture - if we are to believe that the car is painted, the license plate is a hopeless blobby daub by comparison.
I got email confirmation that it would be closer to 25 days. Where did you see the 10 day promise?
There’s a link somewhere on the site that talks about the paintings being done by hand by skilled artists, who are realism experts. I think it’s somewhere in the “gallery” section, where they show off some of the stuff they’ve done.
Also, the fact that they’ll use whatever medium you request (including watercolors or colored pencil) makes me think they’re legit.
Weird. The paintings definitely do not look real–there is no evidence of any sort of brush stroke. But look at this one and the photo it came from. Besides the fact that that doesn’t even vaguely resemble a watercolor (which it claims to be) the skin tone and everything of the child on the right, which is not the child in the photo, is completely different from the child on the left. It’s rather creepy.
They seem to be the same links…
Bull. Where’s the realism on the only part that’s verifiably hand-painted? - the ‘shelby’ number plate. An artist capable of painting the car to that standard wouldn’t make that pathetic job of the license plate.
There appear to be some genuine drawings and paintings in that gallery, but most of them are at best printed pictures with a bit of painting done over the top.
Either my eyes or my mind must be going dim. When I first looked at the name of the website, paintyourlife.com, I saw it as “painty our life.” And I thought “Don’t get yer painties in a bunch, y’all.”
Amen. (Porn by numbers? Please PM me a link!)
ETA-never mind, I see it. :smack:
Either way, those paintings SUCK.
To add to what I said above - look at any of the pictures where they’ve changed anything from the original photo. The bits they’ve left unchanged are almost photorealistic, the bits they’ve changed are very obviously painted - you can see the brush strokes. Why would there be such a contrast/conflict of styles in a single painting?
Upon closer inspection, I can actually see little pixel-like dots of paint all over the place on some of these paintings, instead of brush strokes. I can see what you mean, now.
I’m starting to come around. It seems like a machine probably did most of the work for these.
If they are real, though, the contrast of styles could be explained by two different artists doing the work. Maybe the first one painted it, and a customer requested some changes, leading to the second artist painting over some stuff.
Some of what appears to be pixellation or haltoning is just the texture of the canvas they’ve printed it on, but if you look at the blue racing car close up, you can see where the inkjet has dithered the colours.
Maybe I’m pretentious, but I think those paintings are tacky as hell.
This scared the crap out of me.
There is no way these are for real. They have a level of detail that is not only not really possible in hand painting, but not desirable. Hell they’d be better off putting the photo through a paint filter in Photoshop, then having their paint machine paint a copy of that. It would look more like a painting.
(Even with an opaque projector. Those are really just for getting things lined up and proportioned correctly–like you’d do an outline of the head and put a mark where the lips are, and the angle of the nose, and marks where the eyes are, indicate the general hairline, and that’s it. You don’t go and draw in a bunch of details. Besides, once you paint over what you’ve sketched, you no longer have the sketch to “cheat” from).
Oops, sorry. This should be the second link.
Maybe I could recruit some of the strays on my street and pose them for a picture of them playing poker. That should make for an interesting painting.
Not in 25 days, they didn’t. Genuine oil paintings take months to dry - and if they have a lot of red, or the paint is really thick, takes a good year. Not that a painting has to be perfectly dry in order to be sold – but you couldn’t roll and ship it! It would stick to itself!
The “progress” paintings at the bottom of their homepage are amusing - I think someone really DID paint the second one, because there are plenty of mistakes (which is normal, you wouldn’t expect a rendering to be perfect). The first one is the drawing from the opaque projector, the second is the painting they created. Look at the space from the top of the head to the edge of the paper, and from the side of her mouth to her hand. But then the last two are straight off the printer - two different photoshopping sessions.
I DO think someone actually DID paint this one, of a cat.. The chair is drastically different from the photograph, and from the way the background “sits” in the piece, it’s clear that it was processed it someone’s mind. Plus, it just looks like paint. It’s a very nice piece. I am STUNNED that they were willing to do that for a net of $100 (the artist generally wouldn’t get more than 1/2 of the retail price). Maybe they live in another country, where $100 is really a lot of money? Or perhaps that’s a piece that one of their employees did for themselves, and the company’s owners posted it because it’s a good example? Because it’s an unusually good photograph, too, better than most people are able to shoot.
Here’s a school where they teach “Classical Realism”. Their renderings are tight, and they’re “on”. Excellent. And you can STILL see that a human being drew them, you can see that the image was processed through the filter of someone’s mind.
None of them would copy drawings or paintings for $100 a pop, either. More like 5x that, or more.
Not that it’s necessarily bad to farm out work to people overseas (if that’s what they’re doing) - it might actually be good. Even putting photographs on from a computer and pfutzing with them a little isn’t necessarily “wrong”, plenty of people would probably prefer it, if they really want an exact copy of their photo. I just think they should be honest about what they’re doing.
For one thing, inks from a computer behave differently over time than oil painting, which is probably the most permanent medium (varies a little depending on the brand of paint). I’m not an expert on computer inks, but I know the stuff I’ve made (I was thinking of selling mini-prints I’d made at home) faded in no time flat.