.
Digital Paint Systems: An Anecdotal and Historical Overview
Alvy Ray Smith.
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, pp. 4-30,
2001. [BibTeX]
Digital Paint Systems: Historical Overview
Author(s): Alvy Ray Smith.
Misc: Tech Memo 14, May 30,
1997.
[BibTeX] 
Abstract:
The period I will cover is from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, from the beginnings of the technology of digital painting up to the first consumer products that implemented it. I include a little information about major developments in the later 1980s. Two surveys that cover this later period fairly well - when the emergence of the personal computer completely changed the software universe - were both published in the magazine Computer Graphics World. My emphasis, of course, is on those systems I knew firsthand. I begin with a simple timeline of programs and systems. I will attempt a weighting and a "genealogy" of these in a later section, where I will also narrow the field to those painting systems that have directly affected the movie industry.
Paint
Alvy Ray Smith.
Computer Graphics Lab, New York Institute of Technology, No. Technical Memo 7, 20 Jul,
1978. [BibTeX]
Plants, fractals, and formal languages
Alvy Ray Smith.
Proceedings of the 11th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, pp. 1--10,
1984. [BibTeX]
Table Paint
Alvy Ray Smith.
Published as Tutorial Notes at SIGGRAPH '80 and SIGGRAPH '81,
1979. [BibTeX]
Varieties of Digital Painting
Alvy Ray Smith.
Tech Memo 8, Aug 30,
1995. [BibTeX]