Painting with Gaussians

Last year I built an edge-aware pixelation tool to turn images into pixel art by deforming a grid so that it follows image edges instead of naively using a fixed grid over the picture. Using an edge adapter grid bent to inform the color and brightness of the pixels worked well for keeping edges crisp and preserving details.I later realized the same edge information could also be applied in a context of digital painting. A painting program has to figure out where to put brush strokes, how big should they be, and which direction should they flow in. Much of that is already encoded in the edges since they mark the boundaries between regions. These are the contours around areas of objects that a brush would trace, and their absence indicates generally flat areas where a few broad strokes should suffice.And so, I set off to see if I could make a program that paints in the style of a digital painting where marks derived from the image structure would resemble brush strokes. My goal was to…