Introduction

Watercolor exhibits traits that are not known to other mediums. Using watercolor an artist is able to create textures and patterns that reveal the motion of water across a piece of paper. It can produce vibrant colors and spontaneous shapes. The most important feature of water color is its ability to be applied in layers.

The methods that this website describes will only characterize the most important effects of watercolor. Meaning, only those effects that make watercolor different from other mediums. The watercolor simulator that is described does incorporate some physically-based models, but it is not a strict physical simulation. We have tried to recreate only the artistic features of watercolor that can be controlled and predicted.

We were able to incorporate our method into three different applications. The first was part of an interactive watercolor paint system. The second was a method for automatic "watercolorization." The third application was a mechanism for non-photorealistic rendering of three-dimensional scenes.

The methods that we have used are based on David Small's work on simulating watercolor on a Connection Machine. His work delt with using cellular automata to simulate fluid flow and pigment dispersion. Our work differs from his work in that we had to use a more sophisticated paper model. We also had to create a more complex shallow water simulation. We also created a more faithful rendering and optical composition of pigmented layers based on the Kubelka-Munk model.