.
A Non-photorealistic Rendering of Seurat's Pointillism
Hui-Lin Yang, Chuan-Kai Yang.
Advances in Visual Computing, pp. 760--769, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, Vol. 4292/2006, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Berlin,
2006. [BibTeX]
Realization of Seurat's pointillism via non-photorealistic rendering
Author(s): Chuan-Kai Yang, Hui-Lin Yang.
Article: The Visual Computer, Vol. 24, No. 5, pp. 303--322,
2007.
[BibTeX] [DOI] 
Abstract:
Photorealistic rendering is one of the oldest and most important research areas in computer graphics. More recently, the concept of non-photorealistic rendering has been proposed as an alternative with important advantages for numerous application areas. The popularity of non-photorealism can be mainly attributed to its simplicity, which could potentially lead to a state of aesthetics and succinctness. Reality often presents too many details and too much complexity, thus offsetting the observation of the essence of objects, and objects' interaction with lights. Based on a similar belief, impressionism focuses primarily on conveying the interaction of light and shadows without emphasizing the fine details of a scene. In recent years, there has been a trend towards simulating impressionism with computers. Among the various styles of impressionism, we are particularly interested in simulating the style of pointillism, especially the style presented by Georges-Pierre Seurat, deemed the founder of pointillism. The reason his style attracts us is twofold. First, the painting process of pointillism is extremely laborious, so unloading the main proportion of the manual painting task is mostly desired. Second, though several existing general-purposed algorithms may be able to approximate pointillism with point-like strokes, some delicate features frequently observed in Seurat's paintings are still not satisfactorily reflected. To achieve simulating Seurat's painting style, we have made careful observations of all accessible Seurat's paintings and extracted from them some important features, such as the relatively few primitive colors, color juxtaposition, point sizes, and, in particular, the effects of complementary colors and halos. These features have been more successfully simulated and results are comparable with not only Seurat's existing paintings, but also with previous attempted simulations.