Oil Painting Assistance Using Projected Light: Bridging the Gap Between Digital and Physical Art

This paper presents a novel interactive system for guiding artists to paint using traditional media and tools. The enabling technology is a multi-projector display capable of controlling the appearance of an artist’s canvas. Artists are guided by this display-on-canvas to execute painting techniques. The artist paints according to a linear process of painting by numbers, one layer at a time. Each layer is painted using a set of interaction modes. Preview mode shows the entire layer as the current painting goal. Blank mode shows the state of the painting. Color selection mode displays where to paint a certain color, orientation mode shows how to paint it, and texture highlight mode enhances the texture of the paint following its application. These interaction modes enable the novice to focus on painting sub-tasks in order to simplify the painting process while providing technical guidance ranging from high-level composition to detailed brushwork. In addition to assisting artists for painting, we discuss how our system could be extended to sculpture, woodwork, and other areas of the fine arts. CR Categories: H.5.1 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Multimedia Information Systems—Artificial, augmented, and virtual realities; H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces—Interaction Styles I.4.1 [Image Processing and Computer Vision]: Digitization and Image Capture—Radiometry