Art & Music - Module 4: Simulating an Impressionist Painting (Fall 2026)

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, 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

La Grande Jatte640×431 126 KB

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 used an picture I took on my digital camera in Tequila Mexico. I used similar code to the examples provided, but made it a bit different. I used two shapes for this project. I first used a small square to paint the picture. I made sure that they were small and that it was repeated enough where the most of the stage was covered. After I used a star shape to do the same but I changed the saturation and brightness. This one didn’t repeat as much because I wanted the star shape to still be visible.

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I used a picture of Times Square that I took on my digital camera. My code is somewhat similar to the examples that were provided. Other than the style of pointillism, I also drew inspiration from Van Gogh’s “Self-Portrait”," where the paint strokes seem to facing radially inward. I used small lines, like in Van Gogh’s painting, to paint the picture. I am thinking of using several different costumes to vary up the visual effect of the painting.

Edit: As I was already pretty happy with my artwork, all I did was abstract the code.

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For my project, I transformed a sunset photograph into a pointillist image inspired by Georges Seurat. The program collects colors from random parts of the original photo and paints small dots in those colors. I like how the dots blend together while keeping the sunset and mountains visible.

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I choose five scenery shots from my favorite game, Genshin Impact. I made two different textures one blocky, the other one more painting like. Can someone play it a few times and recommend their favorite combonation?

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I was browsing photos on Unsplash, and since fall is starting, I wanted to make something that feels like autumn. I picked this autumn photo by Emmanuel Cassar because I thought the landscape would go well with Van Gogh style strokes. In my program, each stroke takes its color from the photo, and its direction changes with how bright that spot is. I think this makes the trees and the path look like they’re moving a little.

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I used a picture of a pokemon card that I’ve liked for a long time. I think the watery texture played out really nicely with the mock up of the impressionist art style. So far I’ve used only the original code, what I would like to do is swap out the card with a series of cards that combine to make one image (Like the Vstar sinnoh legendaries with the gold background or plusle and minum). So in this case I would need to adapt the code to handle multiple cards. Personally I am not sure how to do this although I imagine it is somewhat trivial. I’ve been a casual pokemon fan for a while so it was fun to try and combine the game with impressionism!

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i used a picture of the rotunda for this week’s project. At first I wanted to do a “Your Name” painting, but I had issues with the image not filling the canvas completely. If someone can recommend a way of getting around/a way of shrinking the canvas that advice would be appreciated. Also, I have an issue with how each stroke/dot takes a long time to draw/populate the canvas.

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For this project I used an image of Loot Lake which is a location that used to be in Fortnite. After learning about this unit and seeing some of the examples, I immediately thought of a trend I saw on TikTok where people took iconic images from their childhood, turned it into a painting like image as we did here, and then said it is the type of artwork that would be found in their homes in the future. I honestly think it came out really well. It has a nice and nostalgic look to it that perfectly captures the effect I was hoping for. If I could change one thing, however, I think I would want to make each of the strokes smaller so the image is more detailed and the outlines within the image are easier to spot.

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Edit: I updated my code to play around with lines rather than dots as I thought that would be more unique and after playing around with it some and adding some randomness I got this version that I really like. It doesnt look as clear or as easy to make out as the image that was created using dots, but I think this version with the use of lines makes it look like a view through a rainy window which I really like. I think it gives a very unique aesthetic that using dots wouldn’t give

I used a picture I took on my phone in 2023 right outside Ridley where the sky was pink and I thought it looked really pretty. I think before my final draft I want to work with lines instead of the dots to add some uniqueness in the project.

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For this week’s project, I used a UVA baseball picture that I took myself and recreated it using the impressionist/pointillist techniques in Snap. I experimented with placing many small dots of color across the image instead of showing the original photograph normally. I also muted the colors and made the image more black and white, while still keeping some of the orange and green visible. EDIT I tried making the oranges super saturated and everything else muted but I actually didn’t like the look. Instead I kept orange/green at 50% saturation and everything else at close to zero. I liked how this made the final image feel more like a painting while still keeping the baseball player recognizable. But I want to come up with a more creative technique instead of just doing random subtraction to saturation.

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Snap! Module 4: Simulating Impressionist Painting (Eclipse)

I used a picture of Cleveland during the 2024 eclipse that I took on my phone. I wanted to capture that experience in an impressionist-like style through the use of dots that we learned in class. The dots copied the exact hue, saturation, and brightness. I feel like there’s something more that I could have done, like maybe having brush strokes facing the bright zone.

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I simulated an impressionist painting of a photo I took of lanterns in China. I randomized the saturation and brightness to a small degree to give the painting a more enhanced, stylized look. I would like to continue experimenting with how much I should randomize the values for saturation and brightness to achieve a color palette that enhances the original image.

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I wanted to use snakes as my medium of choice, so I looked for images of colorful snakes. The thing I noticed was that the images did not seem to fit the size of the canvas, so it would partially cover up if I just left it. Then I tried moving the image around different parts in the canvas, so the dots would fill up other white spaces. Then I turned the image 90 degrees so that it would cover up other empty spaces as well.

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I did a painting of my bird in snap, I wanted to add my own style to it instead of copying the original piture totally. So I used the normal painting procedure to replicate my bird and painted a backdrop with different shades of green so it represents a tree/forest that my bird is in. My bird’s name is Percy and she is a pearl cockatiel.

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:settings_icon: → Project → Stage size… You can change the e stage width/height in pixels there to fit whatever, I use this quite a lot.

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@nicolechecker Looks great. I like the deliberate introduction of noise to the image. It reminds me a bit of the grain in old photographs.

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@yeoreos Very nice effect. It does a great job of creating a feeling of momentum, like the view is being pulled into the crowd.

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@lavanyaj The link is coming back with a 403 error. If you could unshare and then re-share the link, that usually fixes it.

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@jwlee0516 I love the final effect! If you want to try to create the same effect without having to use a composite image to fill the stage, look under the Settings/Project menu. The very first option “Stage Size” will allow you to resize the stage to fit the image.

Alternately, there are “Stretch” commands under the looks palette. If you that inside of a “Change costume” block, you can stretch a costume to fit the dimensions of the stage.

The first option will match the proportions of the original image. The second will distort the image but keep the original dimensions of the stage.