PaintYourLife.com creates paintings from any photo you give them. Their motto is "you capture it, our artists will paint it," and that’s precisely what they do--and for very little money. Possible subjects include portraits of anyone from loved ones to celebrities (you can have stock photos reproduced in paint) along with landscapes or homes, and even your favorite vehicle or pet.
The paintings are handmade, but they certainly don’t qualify as original. The finished product has zero personality.

It’s only with some digging that the truth about PaintYourLife.com comes out. The company provides a Painter’s Forum (accessible only through the FAQ section) where aspiring artists can ask PaintYourLife.com’s professionals technical questions. The forum doesn’t seem to be particularly popular, and one of the few posts questions the company’s ability to provide the service it does for such surprisingly low prices. The answer is a depressing commentary on the state of our world economy as well as on the way that some people view the work an artist does.

“PaintYourLife doesn’t use any computers or printers in order to paint a portrait, our artists paint only 100% handmade. the reason that our prices are low is because we own a studio in Asia and all our artists are highly talented in painting portraits, they can paint much faster than most painters in the western world.
“In general, artists don’t have stable orders and therefore they must charge a high price for each painting (because they can't know when will he get another painting order). PaintYourLife has many orders per month so each of our painters feel secure in having a stable work and therefore the price is lower than an independent artist.”

I think that pretty much speaks for itself. So why do I keep thinking about the company and what it does?

I guess that I’m just a sucker for “making special.” Though PaintYourLife.com is just one more case of uninspired craft being passed off as real art to the wider community, it at least has the customization factor. It’s not another Thomas-Kinkade Hallmark hotel-room cookie-cutter version of “art.” It’s your life that the company is painting. And I happen to think that there’s something to that. It’s true that detractors of portraiture in the fine art world can point to PaintYourLife.com as the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with the genre, but at least the company is beginning to put value back into a certain kind of individuality that must be custom produced, if not original.

My hope is that, one day, we’ll all be our own brand: we won’t want anything that will make us look or feel like we come off the assembly line ourselves. But, until then, at least my man is his own brand. He asked me to paint his portrait on his hat.

Painting a portrait that is this small is usually difficult for me.

I prefer the wide open spaces of a large canvas!

But, at this point, I know David's face so well that the size of the portrait wasn't as much of an impediment.

The hat completed, a detail image of the portrait.

In some strange way, PaintYourLife.com is a kind of comfort to me. I'm happy that people still want painted portraits of themselves in their homes--even if they don’t want them badly enough to pay a slow, independent, Western artist! The genre may never gain the respect it deserves in elitist circles, but it's good to know that hanging a painted portrait (instead of just an enlarged photo) of oneself in one's home is as popular as ever in the United States.