Op Art rendering with lines and curves

Non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) is an area of computer graphics that studies artistic expressions for digital art. Unlike traditional computer graphics that emphasizes photorealism, NPR explores a wide variety of artistic styles including painting, sketching, and animated cartoons, and develops algorithms for recreating them. One art form that is largely unexplored in computer graphics is Op Art. Short for Optical Art, Op Art is a style of abstract art associated with optical illusions that gained popularity in 1965 with an exhibition called The Responsive Eye [Seitz 1965]. It explores many fundamental artistic and scientific concepts, from geometric shapes and perspectives to colour theory and the psychology of visual perception. To exaggerate certain visual effects, Op artists often use simple shape primitives such as circles and lines in highly contrasting colours such as black and white. We will focus on two types of Op Art—line-based and curve-based—that make use of densely packed lines and curves to convey a hidden underlying image.