Art & Music - Module 4: Simulating an Impressionist Paintings

"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.

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

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.

Here is my Week 4 Assignment!! I've been experimenting with the number of repeats and brush size, and I'm really happy with how this turned out! I remember we talked in class about the slight delay before the image appears. Could you remind me how to enable the "turbo start" or whatever method was mentioned to speed up the process?

Hello @ejkesser. I looked at your project and found it quite interesting as an example of pointillism. I noticed that you made a Week 4 Assignment Emily Kesser, Simulating an Impressionist Painting script pic block. I'm unsure why you did this as one already exists (new script pic (1)). About the Turbo Mode, you can either go to the settings button :settings_icon: and turn it on there


or you can use the new script pic (2) block in Sensing which has a drop-down menu option for turbo mode.
Here it is:
untitled script pic
You can drag this block into any open Snap! window. Once Turbo Mode is on, the flag button will change to Screenshot 2025-02-11 082114.
Have a good day.

This is my Week 4 Assignment! I've been playing around with different shapes like circles, lines, and spirals, but I ended up liking the dot method the best with my chosen picture since there are so many details to it. I also played around with random transparency and it gave my picture a dreamy look which I really liked!

or just set [turbo mode V] to <t>

I realized this just before I saw your reply. Thanks anyway.

Not everybody knows this, but shift-click green flag also turns on turbo mode in both Snap! and Scratch.

Interesting. I definitely didn't know that.

Working on a little change to the original version I did in my bottom left. I want to create lines of dots spaced apart but I'm having trouble creating vertical lines. Snap! Build Your Own Blocks

I think I got it working

Hah, my teacher has this painting a few feet away from me

Here is my week 4 assignment for the week! Project I used a screenshot from a video game I particularly like (Cyberpunk 2077). I enjoy how it gives a general "bright night city lights" vibe.

Edit: nabbed a stylistic choice from a classmate (cur4af) and have enjoyed the moving effect. I have noticed that higher resolution photos, even when zoomed in for some reason take longer compared to a lower resolution photo which doesn't make sense to me in theory but in practice worked so I swapped out my previous photo because it would take painstakingly long to complete.

Here is my week 4 assignment link. I chose a pretty background picture from the internet since I liked more pastel and vibrant colors and really enjoyed the mystical look.

Here is my week 4 impressionist project. I played around with different dots, circles, and lines to figure out what I liked the most. I didn't have any issues creating this, it was a lot simpler than I expected!
https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=abbymeckes&ProjectName=Impressionist%20Painting&editMode&noRun

Hi! Here is my week 4 project that explores using dots and color to make an impressionist painting. I have been playing around with the brush size and have been trying out lots of different pictures to make different paintings. Here is the link: Link!

Here is my Week 4 project! I haven't done anything out of the ordinary so far, but I plan to experiment with different painting techniques to achieve different visuals (i.e. lines vs dots vs squares).

I like the look of what you have! The way you've used lines gives the whole piece a sort of "motion blur" look, which when paired with the original image showing/hiding gives it a very fun appeal.

I'm a really huge fan of the moving effect you were able to create! I'll be completely honest I am "stealing" that. I also thought switching between two different photos was really interesting and is something I also am now inspired by.

I really like the addition of the larger dots in the foreground! It gives the painting a lot of dimension and kind of makes it seem like the background has some blur effect on it which is really cool.

This is my week 4 project: here. I chose a photo I took of the ocean as my base image. I mostly played around with using different sized streaks pointed away from the center to create a bursting out effect, mirroring the way the sun's rays flow out from the center in the original photo.