A desktop app by Jordan Bunke that turns a photo into a digital painting stroke by stroke — using a greedy brush-stroke algorithm, not generative AI.
Last verified · 2026-07-15 · by Moe Ameen
Painterly is a desktop application by Jordan Bunke (jbunke on GitHub, flinkerflitzer on itch.io) that converts a photograph into a digital painting. Its entire pitch is what it is *not*: "Turn pictures into digital paintings. No AI!" There is no diffusion model, no neural style transfer, and no generative network anywhere in the pipeline. It is a deterministic image-processing program, written almost entirely in Java, that arrives at a painting through brute-force trial and error rather than a trained model.
The method is a greedy algorithm. Painterly repeatedly proposes a random brush stroke on the canvas and keeps that stroke only if it makes the painting resemble the source photo more closely than it did before; strokes that don't improve the match are discarded. Run that loop tens of thousands of times and a recognizable painting emerges one accepted stroke at a time — a single example windmill painting is cited as taking 51,750 strokes. Because it is stroke-by-stroke rather than a one-shot render, a painting can take anywhere from several minutes to hours depending on image size, complexity, and the level of detail you ask for, and you watch it build in real time.
Painterly launched in early access on July 14, 2026 as version 0.1.0, sold on itch.io for $14 (a 30%-off launch price against a $20 regular price), with a free demo available through the project's GitHub releases. The downloads are Windows builds. The itch.io listing tags styles like impressionism, renaissance, and hand-drawn, and the app exposes settings that trade painting time against fidelity and stroke character. Being early access, it ships with a public roadmap and changelog and takes bug reports and feature requests on GitHub.
The honest framing: Painterly is a niche, purpose-built art tool with a clear philosophy — human-legible, algorithmic, explicitly AI-free stylization. It produces a painting (and, if you screen-record it, a mesmerizing time-lapse of that painting forming). It is not a content tool. It writes no caption, sizes nothing for a feed, and publishes nowhere.
Painterly hands you two distinct assets from one run, and Kompozy turns each into published content. The first is the finished painting — a still image. Drop it into Kompozy and it becomes the visual for a Photo Post, the hero of a brand-exact Carousel (before/after the source photo, or a set of paintings), or the backdrop for a Quote Graphic in your Persona Brief voice. The second asset is the *process*: because Painterly builds the image stroke by stroke in real time, a screen recording of a painting forming is exactly the "oddly satisfying" content that performs on short-form. Bring that recording in and Kompozy's Clipped Shorts cuts the best stretch into a vertical clip, burns in captions and a hook line over the muted first second via HyperFrames, and reframes it to 9:16, 1:1, and 16:9 so the same time-lapse fits Reels, TikTok, Shorts, and a LinkedIn square.
That process-video angle is what makes Painterly punch above a one-off art tool inside Kompozy. One painting session seeds a full unit: the finished piece for the feed image formats, the time-lapse for the video formats, plus native Text Posts, a Blog Article on your "no-AI, algorithmic art" workflow, and an Email Newsletter — all held to one voice by your Persona Brief so the batch reads as your brand, not a scattered art dump. Kompozy also generates the formats Painterly can't touch: Persona Shorts and HeyGen avatar video to narrate the technique on camera. Then it does the part no desktop art app does — schedules and publishes the whole set across nine social platforms plus blog and email from one queue, with Autopilot and a per-post review pipeline. Paint it, AI-free, in Painterly; turn both the art and the making-of into a published week in Kompozy.
Painterly is a desktop app by Jordan Bunke that turns a photograph into a digital painting. It launched in early access on July 14, 2026 (version 0.1.0) on itch.io. Its distinguishing feature is that it uses no AI — a greedy brush-stroke algorithm builds the painting one accepted stroke at a time instead of a generative model.
No. Painterly's headline is explicitly "No AI!" There's no diffusion model or neural style transfer. It uses a greedy algorithm that proposes random brush strokes and keeps a stroke only if it makes the canvas resemble the source photo more than before, repeating that until a painting emerges — one cited example took 51,750 strokes.
At early-access launch it sold on itch.io for $14 (a 30%-off launch price against a $20 regular price), with a free demo available through its GitHub releases. The available downloads are Windows builds. Because it is in early access, pricing and platform support can change — check the itch.io listing for current details.
It varies from several minutes to hours depending on the image size, complexity, and how much detail you want, because it paints stroke by stroke rather than rendering in one shot. You watch the painting build in real time, which also makes it easy to screen-record as a time-lapse.
No. Painterly produces a painting (and, if you record it, a process time-lapse) and stops there — it writes no captions, sizes nothing per platform, and publishes nowhere. A content engine like Kompozy turns the painting and the time-lapse into captioned posts, carousels, a blog, and a newsletter, then schedules and publishes them across nine platforms plus blog and email.