A Modular Framework for Digital Painting

While there has been tremendous research in the simulation of natural media painting, little academic work has been written to understand how all these contributions interrelate and to use this knowledge to direct future work. In this paper, we survey the set of interesting artistic tools to categorize their effects and motivate a modular framework for digital painting that can reproduce those effects in a loosely coupled way. We use this framework as a lens through which we survey the literature and classify the achievements of previous efforts. We examine our own contributions in the field in more detail, discussing how the framework motivated those results and how it impacted our accomplishments. Finally, we discuss the open challenges that remain for the research community, and how the framework can help to make contributions towards those challenges.