Impressionist Painting in MATLAB

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  Output from the program

Inspiration

We were inspired by impressionist painters such as Paul Signac and Vincent Van Gogh, who advanced the style of using large, dynamic brushstrokes to convey form and motion. We wanted to see if modern image processing techniques could be used to replicate elements of this style

What it does

The program uses image processing tools in MATLAB to emulate an impressionist painting style.

How we built it

The script creates a vector field out of the input image's local gradients, which can be used to approximate the underlying shape of the subject. It aligns brushstrokes to this vector field, so that they can imply the form and depth we want the piece to convey.

Challenges we ran into

Honestly nothing. MATLAB is surprisingly good for this purpose.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The final result – it certainly exceeded our expectations in terms of approximating the techniques of the great impressionists.

What we learned

Art is everywhere! No one piece of software will let you express all that you want to express, so try everything – even MATLAB.

What's next for Impressionist Painting in MATLAB

Other art styles – the intuition that a human artist uses when looking at their subject is something that only a powerful image processing platform can hope to approximate, so we want to see what else MATLAB can enable for generative art.

Built With

• matlab