Watercolor Woodblock Printing with Image Analysis

Abstract

Watercolor paintings have a unique look that mixes subtle color gradients and sophisticated diffusion patterns. This makes them immediately recognizable and gives them a unique appeal. Creating such paintings requires advanced skills that are beyond the reach of most people. Even for trained artists, producing several copies of a painting is a tedious task. One can resort to scanning an existing painting and printing replicas, but these are all identical and have lost an essential characteristic of a painting, its uniqueness. We address these two issues with a technique to fabricate woodblocks that we later use to create watercolor prints. The woodblocks can be reused to produce multiple copies but each print is unique due to the physical process that we introduce. We also design an image processing pipeline that helps users to create the woodblocks and describe a protocol that produces prints by carefully controlling the interplay between the paper, ink pigments, and water so that the final piece depicts the desired scene while exhibiting the distinctive features of watercolor. Our technique enables anyone with the resources to produce watercolor prints.

Data to Physicalization: A Survey of the Physical Rendering Process

“…Portal [HAA∗20] is a structure produced by a laser cutter and a set of mirrors to create an image that does not exist in the environment by reflecting colors from another given image. In addition, to produce paintings, watercolor woodblocks are designed to ease the process of producing several copies of a painting [PPW18]. MoSculp [ZDX∗18] produces a sculpture representing a moving object or person (e.g., a dancer).…”

“…This is quite handy when details need to be added to physicalizations, such as some information about charts axes. Moreover, this ability of engraving, combined with material properties, can be used to make the whole physicalization, such as producing woodblock printing of watercolour paintings [PPW18] (see Figure 15c). Such removal of the material also provides the opportunity to fill the holes with different materials and make novel physicalizations.…”

“…Depending on the community, other programming languages such as Python ® , Java ® , or C++ have been also utilized to make a customized modelling program. Physicalizations for which a standalone program has been produced include Landscaper [ADMAS18], works to add textures on 3D prints [SPG∗16, ZYZZ15, MAWS15], making water color paintings [PPW18], and sliceforms and papercraft generation from volumetric or mesh data [SWR20, RGW20].…”

A digital assistant for shading paper sketches

“…[21][22][23]. Recently Panotopoulou et al [24] developed a wooden block painting system. Unfortunately, this is not scalable and requires a dedicated set of wooden blocks for each painting.…”

Computational Parquetry: Fabricated Style Transfer with Wood Pixels

“…With the goal of non-photorealistic rendering, numerous techniques have been proposed to transform 2D inputs into artistically stylized renderings [Kyprianidis et al 2013]. This includes approaches for the simulation of different painting media such as paints, charcoal and watercolor [Chen et al 2015;Lu et al 2013;Panotopoulou et al 2018]. In recent years, the potential of deep learning has been revealed for rendering a given content image in different artistic styles [Jing et al 2017].…”