Projector-Guided Painting

Matthew Flagg and James M. Rehg
Georgia Institute of Technology, GVU Center

(a) Painting studio setup (b) Painting a layer in preview mode (c) Painting the black regions of a layer in color selection mode (d) Final painting created using our system

Project Description

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 paint according to a process model we designed to solve 3 common problems with novice painters. The artist paints according to a linear process of painting in layers and, within each layer, a set of colors. Each component of our model of the painting process has an associated interaction mode. Preview mode shows the entire layer as the current painting goal. Blank mode reveals the state of the painting. Color selection mode displays where to paint a target color. Color mixing mode shows how to mix it and orientation mode shows how to paint it. 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. We present results of a user study that quantify the benefit that our system can provide to a novice painter.

Publication

featured on the cover
(click image for hi-rez)

Projector Guided Painting
Matthew Flagg and James M. Rehg,
19th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 06),
Montreux, Switzerland, October 2006.