Generation of automatic stippling illustrations from photographs for documenting archaeological pieces

Abstract

Hand-made stippling has been used frequently in the process of drawing illustrations for documenting archaeological pieces. This is due to the fact that this technique represents in an efficient way shapes, tones, and textures, by means of distributing dots on the paper. The process of stippling has needed traditionally the ability of an artist, who usually produces the illustration from photographs. In this paper, a program that generates stippling illustrations of high quality is presented. The developed interface makes possible that any user can generate illustrations without the need of artistic abilities. The program is able to work in realtime, allowing the user interacts with the program. We have developed several artistic techniques in high level tasks that allow to improve the final results.