Abstraction of human figures - in impressionist painting and children's picture book illustration

The human figure is important in art. This project is a qualitative investigation into how abstract depiction of the human figure is done by human artists. I use examples from both impressionist painting and children’s book illustration, and consider the challenges of algorithmically mimicking what human artists can achieve. There are excellent examples in both genres that provide insight into what a human artist sees as important in providing abstraction at di erent levels of detail. The challenge lies in the human brain having enormous knowledge about the world and an ability to make fine distinctions about other humans from posture, clothing and expression. This allows a human to make assumptions about human figures from a tiny amount of data, and allows a human artist to take advantage of this when creating art. The question for the computer graphics community is whether and how we could algorithmically mimic what a human artist can do.

"Abstract depiction of human and animal figures: examples from two centuries of art and craft", N. A. Dodgson, Proceedings of EXPRESSIVE 2018 (the Joint Symposium on Computational Aesthetics and Sketch-Based Interfaces and Modeling and Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering)
DOI link

"Abstract depiction of human figures in impressionist art and children's picture books", N. A. Dodgson,Computers and Graphics, to appear