Top all-time · #3802
Instapainting Blog
Company blog · instapainting.com/blog · on HN as chrischendesignhardwarebusiness
Instapainting Blog is the company blog at instapainting.com, writing about design, hardware and business. Since 2014, 20 different Hacker News readers have linked it 81 times, most often “Inside The Fine Art Factories of Yiwu, China”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-04-09, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (19) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Instapainting's blog for its posts on the Dafen and Yiwu painting factories in China, its robotic and AI painting research, and its own company history.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 19 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Turn your photo into a custom painting on canvas made by a professional artist. Oil, watercolor, charcoal, and pencil from real customer photos, starting at $89.
Most-linked posts?
- Inside The Fine Art Factories of Yiwu, China7 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2015-10-28
- Show HN: Neural network turns photos into a specific style of painting3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-09-02
- Arduino robotic watercolor painter replicates color painting mechanically2 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2015-09-11
- Robo Painter automatically replicates paintings2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-08-24
- Photo to Painting by Artists, Custom Hand-Painted Canvas Oil Painting from Photo2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-10-29
- /blog/company/2015/04/01/no-child-labor/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-04-01
What Hacker News says?
I run https://www.instapainting.com by myself amd it started as a single page with a stripe checkout form.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?”Submitted Inside The Fine Art Factories of China as a story · 252 points
HN discussionInstapainting no longer uses children to paint your photos: https://www.instapainting.com/blog/company/2015/04/01/no-chi...
Comment linking /blog/company/2015/04/01/no-child-labor/
on “List of April Fools' Day Announcements”Submitted Inside The Fine Art Factories of Yiwu, China as a story · 172 points
HN discussionOMG, thank you! I am the creator of https://comments.network/ which you are using on the bottom of the article, and it's the first time I spot it in the wild! If you have any problem/suggestion/anything just write me: public@francisco.io BTW I love what you made, have you considered selling those? It looks like it could have a similar business model as instapainting: http://instapainting.com/
Comment linking /
on “Show HN: ThreadTone – Halftone images made of thread”Submitted The Lives of China’s Art Factory Workers as a story · 109 points
HN discussionWe don't use deep dream, but a CNN to power our Instant Preview Tool: http://instapainting.com/assets
Comment linking /assets
on “Show HN: Koonchi – Convert Photo to Hand-Painted Painting by Artists from India”Submitted Show HN: Real-Time Collaborative Watercolor Painting Using Twitch as a story · 109 points
HN discussionFounder of Instapainting here! We were actually far from the first in this space as well (there were incumbents at the top of the Google search ranks from the mid to early 2000s). As for Instapainting, when ordering and requesting an artist directly, our fee is 26%, unless the artist quotes lower than our base pricing in which case our fee is the difference. We have artists from India too! http://instapainting.com/g…
Comment linking /artists/lavdeep
on “Show HN: Koonchi – Convert Photo to Hand-Painted Painting by Artists from India”Submitted Show HN: Neural network turns photos into a specific style of painting as a story · 75 points
HN discussionAbsolutely. I remember going down this internet rabbit hole one day a few years ago. I remember feeling like it helped me better understand just how many people there are in China that a single city/area could be known for putting out artwork that we see in our chain retailers here in the USA. https://www.instapainting.com/blog/company/2015/10/28/how-to...
Comment linking /blog/company/2015/10/28/how-to-paint-10000-paintings/
on “Show HN: Koonchi – Convert Photo to Hand-Painted Painting by Artists from India”Submitted Show HN: Robot that copies artist's exact strokes to replicate a painting in 3D as a story · 73 points
HN discussionYes there is a big blog about how they set it up with an artist city in China https://www.instapainting.com/blog/company/2015/10/28/how-to...
Comment linking /blog/company/2015/10/28/how-to-paint-10000-paintings/
on “Show HN: Koonchi – Convert Photo to Hand-Painted Painting by Artists from India”Submitted 2x2048 as a story · 71 points
HN discussionOK, just built the Gift Card feature: http://www.instapainting.com/gift-card You can specify a recipient email at checkout and we'll send them instructions via a special page where they upload photos, talk to the artist, and track the status with the pricing hidden. Because I'm lazy, your recipient won't know what type of painting or what size until the artist is finished. But let's just call that a feature for now…
Comment linking /gift-card
on “Holiday Gift Ideas from Y Combinator”Submitted WebRTC 2-player 2048 on same board with matchmaking as a story · 18 points
HN discussion> 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 feature artists from the Bay Area as well as New York, and their prices are actually even lowe…
Comment linking /
on “Inside The Fine Art Factories of China”Submitted Arduino robotic watercolor painter replicates color painting mechanically as a story · 15 points
HN discussionSupposedly they are now child labor free. https://www.instapainting.com/blog/company/2015/04/01/no-chi...
Comment linking /blog/company/2015/04/01/no-child-labor/
on “Inside The Fine Art Factories of China”Submitted Show HN: WebRTC Serverless 2-player 2048 Game with Annotated Source as a story · 11 points
HN discussionThat slightly different, what I didn't like was the following picture, filled with identical works: https://www.instapainting.com/blog/assets/factory.jpg
Comment linking /blog/assets/factory.jpg
on “Inside The Fine Art Factories of China”Submitted Robo Painter automatically replicates paintings as a story · 8 points
HN discussionWe have both: People who paint photos as our main product, and people doing creative art: http://www.instapainting.com/artists . But most people just go for turning a photo to a painting. It's simply where the market and demand is.
Comment linking /artists
on “Inside The Fine Art Factories of China”Submitted Robotic painter flawlessly replicates full color painting using a brush as a story · 6 points
HN discussionWe have been trying: https://www.instapainting.com/ai-painter https://www.instapainting.com/blog/research/2015/09/10/robot... https://www.instapainting.com/blog/research/2015/08/23/ai-pa... Now the trick is to bridge the gap between the neural net algorithm and the physical robot. Unfortunately this photo to line drawing is the best we can do so far: https://twitter.com/instapainting/status/636245176554405892
Comment linking /blog/research/2015/08/23/ai-painter/
on “Inside The Fine Art Factories of China”Submitted Brawling Bohemians as a story · 6 points
HN discussionActually, artists here can find work. I have many friends who do commissions at a constant rate. Some of them are listed in the creative art marketplace: http://www.instapainting.com/artists . They also work in film, animation, video game companies. It's true if you're just straight up copying a photo, you're going to have to compete with the Chinese commercial art industry. But they don't do creative work, so any a…
Comment linking /artists
on “Inside The Fine Art Factories of China”Submitted Turn Vim into a VS Code Style IDE with Remote Collaboration as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI did this for a blog post many many years ago. It was surprising how accurate reproductions would be with just simple dead reckoning. No adjustments were necessary and just by having everything in the same positions it would pretty faithfully recreate the original GCODE. https://www.instapainting.com/blog/research/2015/09/10/robot...
Comment linking /blog/research/2015/09/10/robotic-painter-color/
on “Chaos in the medium: Watercolour plotting”Submitted Automatic Query Batching and Deduplication with DataLoader in GraphQL Servers as a story · 4 points
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