Nowadays, with the help of modern digital techniques, creating filling curve paintings on personal computers (PCs) is becoming more popular. This paper presents a new type of painting tool, FlowPaint, that gives the artist control over the base of a space-filling curve. The framework can be applied to different kinds of space-filling curves, and the author picked the flowsnake curve due to its aesthetics. The work applies hexagon subdivision in a non-homogeneously recursive manner to achieve different art effects.

In FlowPaint, users can select different colors for hexagons and the corresponding curve. By clicking on the hexagons, users can further subdivide the hexagons and therefore control the final pattern of their artwork. The various types of brushes offer users multiple ways to polish their paintings. The “slow brush” enables the animation from one level of subdivision of the hexagon to the next to create detailed patterns of the filling curve.

FlowPaint utilizes graphics processing units (GPUs) to speed up the subdivision procedure. To save GPU memory, flowsnake is implemented using a table drive approach. The author also points out one performance issue: when the density of the sample points is too large.

In the results section, the paper shows artwork made by art students. These paintings demonstrate the amazing effects that FlowPaint can provide users.

Finally, the author summarizes the work and points out some potential new features--color control and user-defined profile brushes--for the next version of the system.