A family of artists, with AI painting yours.

Painted Christmas is the Christmas wing of a family of artists—the same studio that paints cats, wolves, houses and the family dog. Some of us have been creating for seventy years. We built this room because nearly all of the Christmas art we see is one look with the colours swapped, and nearly all of the AI art we see doesn’t inspire us.

So the shelves here are painted from the traditions themselves. Tradition is Currier & Ives, Nast’s wood engravings, the Nutcracker stage, cathedral glass and the luminous cottage. Storybook is the picture book, the stop-motion special, Candy-Cane Lane and the night train north. Silly is the mall-studio portrait in ugly sweaters, antlers on the dog and the snowball fight frozen mid-throw. Forty-eight rooms, and none of the three shelves would recognise the others.

What every one of them shares is the rule: the faces, the coats and the front of your house are kept exactly as you sent them, and a judge scores every painting for likeness before you see it. We paint children here. A parent or guardian signs for every photograph with a child in it, every painting with a child is looked at twice before it is shown, and once more, by a person, before it is printed.

If we are successful, the oil paintings we create in our studio can hang in our own homes and don’t need to be advertised to support our family. Three paintings come back from one photograph, watermarked, before you pay. We hope one of them is the one that hangs over the mantel for the next thirty Christmases.

We are a family of artists, passionate about the act of creation. Some of us have been creating for seventy years. We recognize that times change, so we decided to embrace them: the speed of creating art has accelerated, and ideas become reality in days or weeks rather than months or years.

This studio began with a realization—nearly all of the AI art we see doesn’t inspire us—and with the idea that we could build something better. If we are successful, the oil paintings we create in our own studio can hang in our own homes and don’t need to be advertised to support our family.