Claims

Assistants in Koons' studio use tiny brushes for all painting work, never sponges or larger tools, because Koons demands an extremely smooth finish that resembles photorealistic precision rather than visible brushstrokes.

For Koons' 'Gazing Ball' series of classical painting replicas, the studio developed an even more comprehensive process: the original paintings were separated into composite colors in Photoshop, stencils were created for each color, and the painting's initial layers on canvas were positioned relative to the original reference, with each small area containing 250-300 colors and the average painting containing 7,000 total colors.

During color matching, assistants mix paints by hand to match very specific areas on a reference photo, creating small labeled paint samples that map to corresponding areas on the reference image—a practice common among artists but executed at unprecedented levels of detail in Koons' studio.

For the painting 'Triple Popeye,' there are 141 different colors just for the portion of a hand, and in other pieces 30-40 different colors are required for just one tiny spot in the painting.

After initial color areas are applied in the Gazing Ball series, hyper-detailed brushwork is required to recreate small details and textures of the original classical paintings, with reference images printed at full scale and repeatedly flipped back and forth over the painting area to ensure pixel-perfect recreation.

Koons' painting process is unusually tedious and elaborate: the artist first creates a digital collage of the artwork on a computer, then assistants transfer it onto canvas using carbon paper, then undergo extensive color matching by hand.