Pointilism Practice Page!

Here's a place to point and paint. Georges Seurat invented the technique known as Pointilism, which uses tiny dots instead of broad strokes to put the paint on the canvas. The individual dots of red, yellow and blue are sucked in through your eyes and mixed up in your head to create a variety of shimmering shades.

To learn more about George Seurat, you can visit his page at the WebMuseum, Paris.

To try your hand at Pointilism, try the handy canvas below!

Seurat's 'At the Circus'
Important: After you try painting like Seurat, you can also try painting like Van Gogh and like a Zen Master.

Instructions

Instructional Illustration Click a colored square on the left side to change the color of your paint.

Click one of the dots at the bottom to change the size of your dots.

Click in the white area to place a dot. (Georges Seurat used to do it carefully, one dot at a time.)

Double-click and drag to paint a string of dots. (What you're really doing is dragging the last dot you placed.) Drag slowly to put them close together, or quickly to scatter them around.

Have fun! (Optional.)

An Interesting Aside

One of the reasons that Georges Seurat used the pointilism technique was to get more light into his art. The whitespace between his dots makes his paintings seem to glow.

On the computer, you're painting with light. The colors you use are actually backlit, and have a different quality than putting pigment paints on paper pages. You have an advantage that Seurat didn't have. Would he have bothered with pointilism if he had had a computer to play with?

Now that you've tried painting like Seurat, try painting like VanGogh.
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Created by Dennis Dawson of Enlightened Path Communications
Send me your comments! dennis@epcomm.com

Last updated July 2, 2000