Pointillism

painting technique · art history · color theory · optical illusion

Dots create pictures. Instead of brushing colors together on the canvas, pointillist artists carefully place small dots of pure color side by side. When you step back and look at the painting, your eyes and brain mix the colors together to see the full image.

Your eyes do the mixing. Pointillism works because of how your eyes work. When dots of blue and yellow sit next to each other, your eye blends them together and sees green, even though green paint was never actually used.

Super time-consuming. Creating a pointillist painting takes forever because artists have to place thousands and thousands of individual dots. Some paintings took months or even years to complete.

Started in the 1880s. Artists like Georges Seurat and Paul Signac invented pointillism in France during the late 1800s as an experiment with how color and light actually work.

Based on color science. Pointillism came from new scientific discoveries about light and how human eyes see color, making it both an artistic and scientific adventure.