You in a Famous Painting

How to put yourself in a famous painting with AI

To make a Renaissance painting of yourself with AI, upload one selfie to You in a Famous Painting and set Painting to Mona Lisa or Renaissance Noble. You're painted in as the sitter, in the painting's pose, clothes and brushwork, and the canvas hangs in a gilded frame on a museum wall. The same selfie works in four more: Girl with a Pearl Earring (the default), American Gothic, Victorian Portrait and Art Nouveau. A run costs 1 photo on any plan, with 3 free photos for new accounts.

1. 1Upload a close daylight selfie of one face, without filters or sunglasses. Wherever the painting shows hair, it is painted from this photo.
2. 2Pick the Painting, then hit Create (1 photo); each option brings its own composition, wardrobe and frame.
3. 3Download it from My creations: the whole painting in its frame, with a narrow band of green wall around it.

Which options are real paintings and which are period styles?

Three options rebuild one specific work with you as the sitter: Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Leonardo's Mona Lisa and Grant Wood's American Gothic of 1930, made as a solo portrait of you with the hayfork. The other three are new portraits in a period's manner: Renaissance Noble follows a sixteenth-century Florentine court painter such as Bronzino, Victorian Portrait a London society portrait from around 1890, and Art Nouveau a Parisian decorative lithograph of the 1890s.

Each comes with the age of its surface: fine craquelure and yellowed varnish on the oils, toned paper with faint foxing on the lithograph. Your face is painted with the same brushwork and glazes as the rest, so it doesn't sit on the canvas like a pasted photo, and your real age is kept rather than turned into the young sitter's.

What can you use it for?

• A birthday present for an art-loving friend: their selfie in whichever of the six paintings they like best.
• A pair of portraits for a couple, one as the Renaissance noble and one in the Victorian studio, posted side by side.
• A slide for a class talk or a post about the original painting, with a familiar face as the sitter.

What does an example run look like?

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  AI-generated sample input

  

  Result

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  AI-generated sample input

  

  Result

How do I get a better result?

• For Girl with a Pearl Earring, use your sharpest front-facing selfie. Your hair is tucked under the blue turban, so eyes, brows, nose and freckles carry the likeness on their own.
• Rerun Mona Lisa if the hair drifts. Earlier versions brought back the original sitter's reddish ringlets on a woman with long straight dark hair; the current version kept her own hair, and an earlier run on short grey hair kept it as it was.
• Light-brown hair can turn a little auburn under the warm varnish; we saw it once, on a Renaissance Noble run.

What goes wrong most often?

• Expecting a crown, scepter or throne. Renaissance Noble is a noble, never a monarch. To be painted as nobility together with your pet, in velvet and a gilded frame, use Royal Portrait With My Pet.
• Hoping for a couple in American Gothic. It is made as a solo portrait: you alone in front of the farmhouse with the Gothic window.
• Wanting a photo of yourself in costume. The result is a painting; for a photographic dark-fantasy shoot in a ruined cathedral, try Medieval Photo Shoot.