Mixing Old Styles with New Technology Unveils a New Way of Creating Art

Newswise — Stephen Brooks wields a computer mouse the way an artist uses a brush or a stick of charcoal — he's developed a technique to transform digital images into mixed media artwork.

"Many artists use a number of styles and mediums in the same work," explains Dr. Brooks, assistant professor in Dalhousie's Faculty of Computer Science and a self-taught artist. "By mixing materials, like oil, watercolor, tempera, ink, or pencil, the artist is able to explore new channels of artistic expression or rejuvenate existing ones."

Dr. Brooks brings a similar mixed-media approach to non-photorealistic rendering (NPR). His technique analyses and breaks down images and tries to separate the composition into coherent regions, like a sky or a tree, and processes these regions differently — perhaps a watercolor treatment for the sky and pastel scribbles for the tree. The user can choose the filters he or she wants, for example "paint daubs," "soft glow," "crystallize," "ink outlines," or "cartoon."

The method is unlike a program such as Adobe Photoshop, for example, "where the filters tend to be fairly simplistic and treats the entire image uniformly," he says. "(My) method figures out what's in the image and adapts."

His technique is especially kind to the human face. "If you apply a heavily distorted style, it can give you undesirable results. In my system, the human face is treated as a special case," he explains.

A computer nerd who's always liked drawing, Dr. Brooks says his program can't really replicate the talent and imagination of a living, breathing artist. But it may be useful for desktop publishing and design programs or adaptable for use in film. He's currently collaborating with professors in the film department at NSCAD University to create more artistically styled animations for film or video.

From St. Catharine's, Ont., Dr. Brooks teaches Computer Animation (CSCI 3161), a course he created in 2004, Computer Networking (CSCI 3171) and Visualization (CSCI 6406).

Dr. Brooks' paper describing his technique, Mixed Media Painting and Portraiture has just been published as the featured article in the September/October issue of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.