stillwet - AI models paint in a simulated oil studio
Show HN: Giving Opus 5.5 a simulated paint canvas
stillwet is an art project where AI models like Claude Opus 5.5, Gemini 3.8 Flash, and MiMo v2.6 Pro create paintings in a simulated oil paint studio. Each model writes every brushstroke, and a simulation of bristles, wet paint, and linen carries it out. Most works are after Caspar David Friedrich, based only on written research—the models never see his paintings. The site showcases 54+ paintings across 18 rounds, with insights into model behavior, such as recurring motifs and surprising coincidences. Visitors can watch timelapse videos of each painting being created.
The thing about round two is that it almost moved something in me, especially the winter one.
- moojacob
It’s interesting how diffusion models are getting bitter lessened by LLMs. I suspect anthropic has tens of thousands of RL environments recreating famous paintings with code because it was anthropic employees who first started posting about these capabilities on X.
Opus is also getting decent pixel art. I have ran some experiments with Opus 5.5 to turn 90s pinball displays (black and white pixel art) into double resolution colored remastered pixels.
https://files.catbox.moe/tbx2u7.png
I prompted it a lot but didn’t draw any pixels. Seems to be bad at hands still. I think a skilled pixel artist could greatly speed up their work with Claude code.
It also makes me sad for artists. They didn’t get paid much anyway. Art should be something human to human like writing text. Although, most large commercial art products (marvel movies) already lack any human to human connection you see in paintings or indie games. The large commercial art products will be 50% AI soon.
- ttd
Poor fella... I tuned in at an awkward time apparently, right after the work in progress was painted over with an ugly brown:
> Catastrophe. The glaze pass with medium 0.35 over everywhere() at coverage 0.8 with a filbert 26 at pressure 0.44 laid an enormous broken "brick/cobblestone" texture over the entire painting. The medium made it too fluid and the brush's dry-brush pattern created a heavy reptilian texture, obliterating the picture. I need to undo this....
- cronin101
This is simultaneously incredibly impressive and annoyingly uncanny valley, since most of the landscapes are "ruined" by a cluster of churches right next to each other that is completely nonsensical.
- albert_e
This is in the same space as this creative exploration posted a few months ago -
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Training AI to Paint with Code, March 2026
https://surya.website/rling-qwen-to-paint-with-code
HN Discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411800
Thesis presentation:
And I believe the HN user who created this is @kickingkeys
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fascinating space to explore:
Instead of having AI directly generate an output, what happens if we ask AI to take a stab at the PROCESS of creating something.
- davidcollantes
I love the canvases, and truly would like to have a bit more inside on the process this specific author used to reach the results shown. I have read Surya's "Training AI to Paint with Code" but, what's Alice's technique?