Random Marks on Paper: Non-Photorealistic Rendering with Small Primitives
Author(s): Andrian Secord.
Master Thesis: University of British Columbia,
2002.
[BibTeX] 
Abstract:
Non-photorealistic rendering is a branch of computer graphics which draws heavily from the traditional artistic disciplines such as painting, drawing, and etching. The emphasis of this research area is to provide rendering styles to artists that communicate, elucidate and express ideas clearly and with style without necessarily reproducing every detail. This dissertation presents two general approaches to reproducing a greyscale input image with small primitives: strokes, stipples or hatch marks. The first approach probabilistically places primitives on the output canvas and achieves very fast, "sketchy" renderings. The second approach, complementary to the first and based on weighted centroidal Voronoi diagrams, places each primitive carefully in relation to the others and minimises unnecessary overlap between primitives. The resulting drawings have a very careful appearance and reproduce the input image faithfully.