painting

Pixelist Turns Your Favorite Instagrams into Hand-Made Oil Paintings

There a good few Instagram-related services out there that offer you different ways to print, send and/or use your favorite Instagram shots. From Postagram, which lets you send your Instagrams as (sometimes free) postcards to friends, to the Nike web app that allowed you to decorate your sneakers based on an Instagram photo, we've seen quite a few applications.

The most recent idea to catch our eye is Pixelist, and it's gotten our attention because, unlike any of the rest, it turns your Instagrams into a hand-crafted product.

Artist: Criticized Photo-Based Painting of Kate “Doesn’t Photograph Well”

The painting above is the first official portrait of Kate Duchess of Cambridge (formerly known as Kate Middleton). When it was unveiled to the public earlier this month, art critics around the world bashed it for making Kate look ghostly and much older than she actually is. On the receiving end of all the criticism has been British artist Paul Emsley, the man who photographed Kate Middleton and then turned one of the photos into the painting seen above.

Artist Has Self-Portrait Painting Approved as Drivers License Photograph

Check out this portrait photograph of Swedish artist Fredrik Saker. It's actually a self-portrait that Saker painted by hand. While we've seen and shared photo-realistic drawings before, Saker's came up with a clever way of validating his photo's realism: he managed to have it approved as his drivers license photo.

Camera Obscura and the Paintings of Old Masters

Did you know that some of the most famous master painters from centuries past may have actually used camera "technology" to aid them in creating their masterpieces? According to the hotly debated Hockney-Falco thesis, some well-known artists likely used rudimentary camera obscura rooms as a tool -- essentially "tracing" parts of their work.

Artist Recreates Photos by Hand Using a Simple Date Stamp

Artist Federico Pietrella has a clever and impressive way of "printing" his photographs. After selecting one he wants to use, Pietrella recreates it by hand using nothing but a date stamp and ink. Pointillism is usually done with distinct dots, but each of Pietrella's dots are a short row of numbers indicating the current date.

Underwater Photos That Mimic the Look of Baroque Paintings

Hawaii-based photographer Christy Lee Rogers specializes in creating dreamlike photos of people underwater. Her project Reckless Unbound shows people swirling around one another while wearing colorful outfits. The photos are reminiscent of the paintings of old Baroque masters, who would often paint people floating around in heavenly realms.

Renegade Art Restoration Turns Into a Real-Life Photoshop Disaster

If there was such thing as a Photoshop disaster in real life, this story would probably qualify. An elderly woman in the city of Zaragoza, Spain recently took it upon herself to restore an 19th-century fresco of Jesus that had been deteriorating over the past few years. As you can see from the before and after photos above, the results weren't pretty.

Why Plexiglass is Used to Protect Art

A 22-year-old Houston artist named Uriel Landeros made news this past week after walking into Houston’s Menil Collection museum and vandalizing a priceless 1929 Picasso painting titled Woman in a Red Armchair. A fellow museum patron captured cell phone footage of Landeros spray painting the word "conquista" onto the painting using a stencil. The painting was rushed to the museum's conservation lab for an emergency restoration, and Landeros was just arrested and charged with two third-degree felonies.

Portraits That Recreate Paintings by the Old Masters

Photographer Josef Fischnaller shoots portraits that recreate famous paintings by the Old Masters, often including some humorous modern day elements in the scene. The photos remind us of the "Remake" contest photos that we shared a couple months ago.

Wave this Programmable “Light Saber” to Light Paint Words and Images

Gavin of Sydney, Australia created an awesome 2-meter long programmable staff that makes painting giant words and images as easy as waving/walking the staff around during a long-exposure photograph. The staff, which he call the LightScythe (we would have called it the "Lightsaber"), was inspired by the Wi-Fi light painting project we shared here earlier this year.

The hardware is pretty simple. There’s a 2m programmable LED strip inside an acrylic tube, which is controlled from a small receiver and battery pack. A laptop PC with a wireless Xbee link sends the image data to the scythe at a specified time. [#]

Nikon D7000 with Custom Paint Jobs

Cars can have pretty creative paint jobs, but it seems like the best anyone can do with a DSLR is do a messy DIY repainting or buy a Pentax with ridiculous or nasty-looking designs. Sherwin Sibala came up with these unique design concepts showing what a DSLR (specifically a Nikon D7000) might look like if people chose to personalize the body.

Camera Graffiti on Canvas by Joe Suta

Threadless' in-house graffiti artist Joe Suta creates 3 giant (48'' x 36'') paintings for their Chicago store window each week, which are then sold through the Threadless website for $250 a pop.