Art & Music - Module 4: Simulating an Impressionist Painting (Fall 2024)

For Teachers
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"Creating Art & Music" is an introductory course designed to introduce creative activities in the context of art and music. Thus far the course has been taught at the middle school, high school, community college, and university level (with appropriate adaptations for each level). Each week this fall, students in the course are posting their projects in this strand of the Snap! forum. Here's a link to the course materials:

Art, Animations & Music

This week's module is titled "Simulating an Impressionist Painting". In it, we will expand on the work we did in the last module to look at ways in which we can use Snap! to create art in the style of painters like Georges Seurat, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Vincent van Gogh.

La Grande Jatte

Figure 1:
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat (1884-1886)

Van Gogh
Van Gogh1200×1450 751 KB

Figure 2:
Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat by Vincent van Gogh (1887-1888)

Neo-Impressionism is a term coined to in 1886 to describe an art movement founded by French painter Georges Seurat. Around this time, France was entering a more modern era, and painters were in search of new methods. Neo-Impressionists in particular were drawn to modern urban scenes as well as to landscapes and seashores. Their interpretations of lines and colors were interpreted as much by science as by art, and they often employed Pointillist and Divisionist techniques in their work.

Some argue that Neo-Impressionism became the first avante-garde movement in painting. At the time, it was seen as an anarchistic attempt to combine optical properties of light with emerging theories of psychology to combine opposite ideas: the ideal and the realistic; the concrete and the ephemeral; (as it was seen at the time) science and art.

Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte Explained (10 min)

Art in Context: The History of Pointillism (Article)

The assignment for this week is to create a work of art inspired by the art discussed this week. You will build a program that converts a photograph into a neo-impressionist image. The program should collect color data from the original image and then use that to re-interpret it, producing a neo-impressionist interpretation of the original

Save your program to the cloud, share it so that others will be able to access it, and then post the link as a reply in this strand.

Please provide contextual information for your project, letting us know if there are any particular artists or aspects of neo-impressionism that inspired your work.

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I really like that neo-impressionism illustrates real objects, rather than just abstract splatters like Pollock. For this project I chose to recreate a film image of a friend and I from Prague, because it seemed similar to the landscape of Sunday Afternoon. It is linked here: impressionist

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https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=tristar10&ProjectName=Impressionist
I took the original photo on the night of aurora that happened in May of this year. As an effort of making an impressionist painting style, I used thick wide lines that all angled in one direction to create a crayon/watercolor-styled impression. I used my code to only select the bright parts within a certain y-range (i.e. the aurora part) and did a color shift and left the remaining parts unchanged. I am overall pretty pleased with how it came out.

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I switched my image to a photo I took where lights above me created a bunch of colors on my arm. Using pointillism I create the image. Then using the reflect color portion I changed the hue to 0. This creates a nice effect where the image changes color to a red color palette. Link: Impressionist Assignment - Spencer Lewis

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For my project, I decided to use a photo of my cat as the canvas. I just made the pen move 3 to create a short line to imitate the impressionist paintings rather than just dotting it. I wanted to try to make the pen move from left to right, top to bottom instead of randomly choosing a position, but I haven't tried it yet, and I like that the brush strokes are all randomly overlapping rather than overlapping in order, if that makes sense.
Link

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I used a photo I took in Burano, Italy because I thought the vibrant colors would be fun. I used lines to make the impressionist style and had the direction the lines were made be randomized. I wasn't a fan of the empty space if I only made a certain amount of lines, so I repeated this process multiple times. Snap! Build Your Own Blocks

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Here is my project. I imported a photo I took at the rotunda when I got up early to see the sunrise. Something I struggle with is aiming for the right amount of dots to not leave blank spots in the painting but at the same time not dotting too much where it blurs the object.

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Here is the link to my project for this week: Impressionist Project. I replicated a photo I took this past winter when skiing using lines at random positions to replicate an impressionist style of painting. I attempted to find the right amount of repeating cycles to have an optimal amount of empty spots in the painting.

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Here is my take on an Impressionist Painting. I decided to use small squares instead of circles and it creates a very cool result. I also added some code to create a sort of smearing effect over time. The picture that I used was one that I took over the summer of an afternoon sky. Right after I took this picture, lightning arced across. I wish I had captured that. I hope you enjoy this project!

Update: I organized and cleaned up the code. I also added a gravity effect and removed the random sideways movement for the dripping.

Link: Impressionist Painting

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Hi! My design for this project is built on top of the photo I took last semester, the solar eclipse at the Engineering School area. I intended to not just use dots, but strokes (so gradually increasing the pen size through the loops) to create the scene. The effects are aimed to be replicating the feeling when we look up to the sky through a tilted mosaic window.

Here is my project link: Snap! Build Your Own Blocks

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Hey! Your approach to blending the natural beauty of the aurora with the impressionist style is striking to me. The thick, angled lines give the image a dreamy, hand-crafted feel, while the color shift in the brighter parts amplifies the ethereal quality of the aurora. I especially like how the transition from the untouched areas to the modified aurora region creates contrast, making the aurora stand out more vibrantly. Have you considered experimenting with different brushstroke patterns or angles to see how they influence the flow of the aurora? This could add a dynamic layer to the overall composition.

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I created an impressionist painting based off a photo I took while in Cancún, Mexico. I used dots to comprise the painting, and after creating the initial Reflect Color and Paint Canvas functions, I also created Reflect Shifted Color and Paint Shifted Canvas functions, which create an impressionist painting with shifted colors by taking the hue underneath the turtle and adding a set amount to it. The Paint Shifted Canvas function is currently used in the project. I do wonder if there is any way I can make the code faster; I did find it ran faster if I hid the turtle sprite, which is why that is done in Setup, but the code does still take a while to complete. Moreover, I am curious how to make an impressionist painting using a color palette from a different photograph, as we briefly discussed in class.

Here is the link to the project: Impressionist Painting

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For my impressionist painting, I used a photograph of a boat in the water that I took on an island in Punta Cana. After playing around with the code, I realized I like how the painting looks when the pen size is the smallest and the number of repetitions is large, since this makes it look as close to the original picture as possible.

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Here is the link to my project: [Rotunda] .(Snap! Build Your Own Blocks) I used a photo of the Rotunda and reflected over it. I didn't reflect enough to cover the whole painting, because that felt too much like the actual picture. However, I reflected enough to still distinguish what the image was.

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Here is the link to my project: Snap! Build Your Own Blocks For this project I used a picture I took of a flower stand in New York from this summer. I thought the colors would look nice in this impressionist style. I tried out different pen sizes and # of repetitions in the loop to see which I thought looked best for this photo.

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My impressionist painting is of some jellyfish I saw at the California Academy of Science museum. I wanted just one clear subject for this piece so that's why I picked the photo. Originally, I planned on having more prominent brush strokes (lines) for the neo-impressionist look, but due to the details of the jellyfish disappearing, I stuck with the dots for better clarity. I also incorporated slight variations in pen size and movement to prevent the dots from appearing as perfect circles.

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Your painting is really cool! The texture created with the white specks between your dots adds such a unique effect that transforms the scene from a beach photo to something more impressionistic. It screams Georges Seurat all over it, with the dots simulating the pointillist technique. I could definitely see this in a museum!

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I agree that the colors go very well with the impressionist style and I really enjoy looking at this project. I think the pen size and number of repetitions you used in your painting was a great choice as it follows the impressionist style while also having the flowers' different colors visible. I am excited to see how this looks when printed out.

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I like the result of this one a lot. Since you only repeat the dot process a certain amount of times, the painting created looks like a worn out old photograph. This is really neat and I think it embodies a particularly nice twist to this project.

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I think it is really cool how you set the hue to zero to shift the color palette towards red. I also think it is interesting how the dots miss some places and those empty spaces appear as white dots. Those white dots remind me of stars against the black background. The code is also well organized.