Art & Music - Module 4: Simulating an Impressionist Painting

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 a sunset photo I had taken this fall because it doesn’t have a lot of fine detail. I decided on triangles as the basis for the impressionism because I thought that the way they point in one particular direction could make my piece more interesting.

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Here is my impressionist painting! This piece was inspired by a photo I took of the Trevi Fountain on vacation with my family a few summers ago. I built on what we learned in class, but changed the paintbrush stroke to be lines instead of dots. This helped capture more details of the image itself and I thought it turned out well!

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https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=ilirong99&ProjectName=week%204%20assignment

For this project, I used a few photos I took last summer, where one is randomly selected at the beginning. I used lines instead of dots to get a more Van Gogh over Seurat style and thought making them radial gave it a fun hyperspace effect.

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I like that you varied the pen size to make it more organic! I feel like using Reflect Color in the horizontal line block definition is a little redundant? Other than that, this is very clean!

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My project is very simple, drawn from one of my favorite nature photos I have ever taken. I tried two methods: a dot variation and a line variation. With dots, I had to vary the size a little, as I found the smaller the dot size, the more detailed the photo could be, but I would need many more repetitions. With the lines, I had to utilize more repetitions and the line sizes, but the outcome looks much more like brushstrokes than just placed dots.

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Here is my impressionist painting! I used a picture I took from last winter during a vacation. For my artstyle, I used what we did in class, but did a combination where it randomly chose between drawing a triangle or drawing a dot. The reason for this was to give my art a bit more texture and detail.

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https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=camxhou&ProjectName=module%204

I used a picture of the Arc of Triumph (?) from an old trip. I ended up drawing lines instead of dots to have more dimension in the drawing and to have more variation in the color. There is a bit of distortion in the clean lines from the original picture since I wanted to use a larger pen size as well. I wasn’t particularly inspired by anything but I wanted to have a distorted effect of something almost clean cut.

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I like how you changed between dots and triangles! I totally did not consider that when making my project. I’m not sure if this is just on my end, but it looks like your original picture is a bit blurry from the start. I was wondering if this was intentional or just a discrepancy on my side. Super cool otherwise!

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I got this picture taken of me when I was hiking in Ecuador! I thought it would look cool to turn this into an impressionist work. I think it turned out well, maybe I could have used a different shape to dots though.

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https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=artiehumphreys&ProjectName=Impressionist%20Painting
Here, I took a picture of a pond and utilized a unique approach for the sizing of the dots drawn. I was reminded by the seam carving algorithm during the lecture yesterday and opted to make a process that drew dots based on the variability of the hue, saturation, and brightness of surrounding pixels. This led to a really cool result in my eyes.

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I used a picture of the rotunda for my impressionist painting. I followed the technique we learned in class, but used two different layers of dots. The background layer had large, opaque dots while the top layer had small, partially transparent dots. I thought the transparency would help blend the dots together, and it created a nice effect after a lot of tuning of the number of dots and transparency level.

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This is a really cool project! I really like how you used the transparency to make the artwork more complete and give it a sense of depth and realism. Something I was thinking is that you could try experimenting around with different transparencies and dot sizes to see if that would further elevate it. Otherwise this is a really cool piece!

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https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=joeressler&ProjectName=Module%204

I decided to go with a beach scene that was depicted with small dashes (5 steps per iteration). Something I wanted to get out of this project was to experiment with and better understand the relationship of hue, brightness, and saturation. For this project, I wanted to depict the scene in a more “neon” color scale. To do this, I increased the saturation of each point by 25 and increased the brightness of each point by 20. I think this created a very nice effect when paired with the dashes I implemented.

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I went with a photograph I took last summer in an indoor Spa in Bali. I really liked the dark and light colors and the ambiance of the whole scene. I practiced what we learned in class with the dots and Reflecting the color of random pixels. I experimented with different dot sizes as well and liked the distorted look it gives right now.

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I really enjoyed the different pictures and how the same effect looked on them. It’s giving that blur and tunnel vision effect and it feels like i’m being drawn into the center. There are a lot of lines of code, so maybe you could combine some. Overall, it’s really cool!

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https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=zixingyu&ProjectName=hw4

I used a photograph of Mount Fuji and applied techniques we learned in class to simulate an Impressionist-style painting. Instead of using dots, I generated short lines to mimic Van Gogh–like brushstrokes, emphasizing the movement of the lines.

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I really like how you pointed all the lines toward the center to create a hyperspace effect. One suggestion might be to slightly vary the brushstroke length or pen size based on the distance from the center, which could add more depth and enhance the sense of motion.

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I used a still image from one of my favorite scenes (Sneakers O’Toole) from my favorite TV show and applied a generic impressionist overlay over the background. I experimented with using lines and swirls to achieve a different stylistic feel, but found that they felt more distracting and chaotic than the “blur” of the standard circle, and decided to lean more into that aspect. To do so, I repeated the process of reducing the still into circles, with each iteration using fewer, larger circles, and as the circles grew larger I decreased their opacity to create a haze effect that almost reminds me of dust on a camera lens. I was very happy with the outcome from this and will look for more ways to abstract my image in the future.

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Like the photo! It was cool you used lines instead of dots which maybe I could have used in mine