A Non-photorealistic Rendering of Seurat’s Pointillism

In recent years, there has been a trend on 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

, as he was deemed the founder of pointillism. The reason that his style attracts us is twofold. First, the painting process of pointillism is extremely laborious, so simulating his painting style by computers is desired. Second, though several existing impressionism algorithms may approximate pointillism with point-like strokes, some delicate features frequently observed in Seurat’s paintings are still not satisfactorily reflected by those general schemes. To achieve simulating Seurat’s painting style, we made careful observations on all accessible Seurat’s paintings and extract from them some important features, such as the few primitive colors, point sizes, and the effects of complementary colors and halos. These features have been successfully simulated and results are compared with not only Seurat’s existing paintings, but also with previous attempted simulations.