Creating Watercolor Style Images Taking Into Account Painting Techniques
Author(s): Henry Johan, Hiroshi Hashimoto, Tomoyuki Nishita.
Article: The Journal of the Society for Art and Science, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 207--215,
2004.
[BibTeX] 
Abstract:
Research for creating impressive images like paintings has attained more and
more importance because of the recent growth in processing images. Among many
painting styles, watercolor style gives a strong impression because of its
thin colors and its soft appearance. This paper proposes a method to create
watercolor style images from input images, for instance photographs. In
contrast with the previously proposed watercolor methods that focuses only on
simulating the effects of watercolor medium such as the mottled appearance and
the color glazing, the proposed method also considers how the watercolor
paintings are painted in order to simulate artists' painting techniques. In
the proposed method, artists' painting techniques are represented using
painting rules. Several painting rules are provided, in addition, user can
specify their own painting rules. These painting rules are used for generating
strokes to paint the objects. Painting techniques are simulated by first
detecting the objects in the input image and generating strokes for each
object according to the painting rules. The properties of watercolor medium
are simulated by approximating each stroke with sampling points and diffuses
their color to nearby pixels. Using the proposed method, a user can
interactively create watercolor style images.