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Life & fun · November 17, 2015

RT

Real-Time Collaborative Watercolor Painting Using Twitch

We hooked up our robotic painter to Twitch.tv so you can see it, control it, and paint with it.

Real-Time Collaborative Watercolor Painting Using Twitch launched on November 17, 2015 with 109 votes, #340 of 4,110 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 10 years on.

Visit instapainting.com ↗Alternativestop 8% of November 2015

In plain words

Real-Time Collaborative Watercolor Painting Using Twitch is a robotic painter connected to Twitch.tv that allows viewers to control it simultaneously through a graphical interface. Users can direct the robot to paint by clicking on a canvas, with results streamed live. The robot can copy paintings, create colored artwork, and draw line sketches from photographs. Built by a team that primarily commissions human artists for portrait work, this project demonstrates automated painting capabilities while enabling interactive participation from online viewers.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

While our main business involves getting human artists to paint portraits and other art from photographs , many months ago we built a robot to do it in the name of science. We had it copy a black and white painting and copy a colored painting done by some talented artists and draw a line sketch of a photograph of Cthulhu . Now we've hooked it up to the internet, and are live-streaming it from Twitch so you can all take live control and make it do stuff —at the same time! We've improved our controls with a GUI. Just click where you want to go. If you're watching from the Twitch.tv stream, you can also send X, Y, or Z values, separated by spaces, into the Twitch chat. Z controls the brush…from instapainting.com

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