LOKLik iPaint review – turn your photos into paint-by-number

REVIEW – I will admit I’m a veteran painter, but I’m not a GOOD painter.  My experience is limited to some sip and paint sessions with my silly friends and a fun “paint your pet” class or two. I enjoy painting, though, so when the LOKLiK folks were looking for someone to test their newest gadget, the iPaint, I knew I had to try it.  It will turn photos or graphics that you design into paint-by-number projects by drawing on whatever surface you want.   I gave it a shot and I have to say, there is huge potential here.  There are some things you need to know before you jump in blindly, however.

⬇︎ Jump to summary (pros/cons)
Price: $199.00
Where to buy: Kickstarter launch

What is it?

This is a machine that will draw a paint-by-number on canvas or pretty much any other surface that you can write on.

What’s included?

• The machine itself in two pieces
• Screw, screwdriver and screw cover
• power supply
• a roll of tape
• two unstretched canvases
• one gel pen and two heat sensitive pens
• a set of three paintbrushes
• a 48 piece paint set
• some instruction sheets

Tech specs

Max drawing area:  16.5″ x 11.7″
Max material height:  16mm (.62 inch)
Compatible materials:  canvases, canvas panels, stretched canvas, watercolor paper, printer paper, material with flattened surface (wooden board, embroidery cotton)
Native XY resolution: 5029 steps per inch (198 steps per mm)
Product weight: 2.6kg/5.73lb
Product dimensions: 22.8x 21.6×5.7 incehes/63.5x30x15.5 cm
Connections:  USB, Bluetooth

Design and features

The LOKLiK iPaint is launching as a Kickstarter and purports to be the first AI-powered painting machine.  I don’t know a lot about its use of AI, but it allows you to take your own photo or a graphic you found online, or even one you designed and it will draw it on things like canvas, paper, tattoo transfer paper, embroidery transfer paper, etc.  It will draw using the supplied gel pen or if you want your lines to disappear after painting, a heat sensitive pen.  After you’re done, you just heat the canvas slightly using a hairdryer and poof!  No more lines.  It comes with access to a library of Loklik’s graphics, and the software allows you to choose how detailed the paint-by-number will be.  If you don’t want to bother with numbers (and in the future, I probably won’t, and I’ll show you why), it will also draw without assigning numbers.

Assembly, Installation, Setup

There is only one screw that holds the drawing housing together, and your biggest challenge will be to find it!  I thought LOKLiK forgot to include it, but it turns out it was rattling around loose in the bottom of the box.  Diddo for the screw cover, which looked like a scrap piece of foam just floating in the box.  I think the manufacturers should consider putting those items in a bag together with the power supply or something else so it isn’t so easy to miss the parts.  If I was quicker about putting the box into the recycling bin, I would have for sure lost them.  When assembled, this takes up about as much room as your average laser cutter, but unlike your average laser cutter, there’s just one screw to deal with so you can easily break it down for storage, which I like.  You also need to download some software from Loklik, and then you have the option of connecting the LOKLiK iPaint via Bluetooth or USB to your computer.  I found this process straightforward and intuitive.   Although LOKLiK has an app, the iPaint did not appear to be a part of it — yet.  No telling if LOKLiK iPaint is going to be able to be used from the phone.  My guess is that it might not be, given the fact that these layouts are hard to see in detail on a small screen like your phone.  It would make sense on a tablet, however.

Performance

For my LOKLiK iPaint review, I opted to paint a photo of my son and a soccer ball.  It’s colorful and has bold color blocks, so I thought it would be an easy one to convert to paint-by-number.  I installed the software and it was so intuitive, I didn’t even need the manual or any directions.  I just figured out how to import the photo and then I was off to the races.  Initially I didn’t understand the difference between making a “line drawing” and a paint-by-number, so I first did the line drawing without numbers until I figured out what to click to make it have numbers.  I used the included heat sensitive pen, and then I busted out the paints.

The LOKLiK iPaint 48-color acrylic paint set is nice.  It’s a great starter set that has several different fleshy tones in a variety of shades, but obviously, Loklik can’t include every skin tone in a 48-paint set.  Not everyone will use this kit to paint pictures of people, but I encourage you to go to the craft store and find the skin tone you need if you don’t find it in the set.  You’ll probably need to go to the craft store anyway for extra paint because the paint pots are pretty small, and the caps kept popping open on me so the little bit of paint in there would sometimes dry out on me. I didn’t want to paint a super large picture because I knew I’d need to have it done for the review (and I didn’t even finish this small one) so my painting had some pretty small areas — so small that I couldn’t read the numbers.  As it turned out, that wasn’t a huge deal because the numbers are more of a guideline than anything else.  For instance, in the reference photo, you can see that my son’s shorts are red and blue.  His shirt is blue and white.  The LOKLiK iPaint software assigned the colors 12 and 31 to the shirt, which is a battleship gray and sky blue.  The shorts were 11 and 45, which are mushroom brown/gray and a sage-y green.  So clearly, you need to use some common sense and use colors that correspond to the reference material and forget the numbers sometimes.

For my painting, I simplified the background and kind of went out on my own with the shading.  I was happy to have the drawing to see the shapes and where the shadows were, and of course, the LOKLiK iPaint didn’t do very well on the face area, so I had to do my own thing there too.  I should tell you that I chose the simplest of the paint-by-number choices, which may have had something to do with the way the LOKLiK iPaint interpreted the face.  There are three difficulty settings, easy, medium and complex.  I chose easy because the picture was only about  9 inches high and as it was I had a lot of small areas to paint. I bet if I’d chosen complex I would have a much clearer face to paint.

In the future, I think I’d be interested in exploring the LOKLiK iPaint library of graphics, and if I had kids, that would be my go-to.  They have wonderful designs for cards, signs and other fun kid projects.  Even my grown child was interested in this gadget because he was considering making a painting for his girlfriend.  I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t appreciate the effort of making a painting if they received it as a gift, and if you become an awesome painter along the way, you could even start commissioning with the LOKLiK iPaint as a little shortcut!

Final thoughts

I really liked the potential in this product.  Some of the software could maybe use a little tweak, like in the color recognition department, but the LOKLiK iPaint is a really cool creative tool!

What I like about LOKLiK iPaint

• Gives you a neat starting point if you want to paint something from a photo or other graphic
• Was super easy to use!

What needs to be improved?

• Color recognition needs work.
• How about packaging up that foam piece and the screw so they aren’t lost.

Price: $199.00
Where to buy: Kickstarter launch
Source: The sample of this product was provided for free by LOKLiK. LOKLiK did not have a final say on the review and did not preview the review before it was published.

Check out these other reviews!

• eufyMake E1 UV printing system review
• How to turn yourself into an action figure!
• Ohuhu Honolulu S Series Alcohol Art Markers review