Abstract: One of the artistic impressions of typical oil painting artworks is its wide spectrum of visual variety as the lighting condition changes. This distinguishable feature of oil painting comes from the texture and a volume of color expressed by thickness of used pigments and brushing. In this paper, we present a novel method to synthesize an oil painting image from a source picture based on a virtual light and non-photorealistic rendering technique. To generate the oil painting image as an output, our system first performs stroke distribution, which determines where the brush is located for a stroke, using an edge detection technique and an image segmentation process on a source image. Then an intermediate image is produced with proper colors, an orientation and a size of the brush at each stroke point. Finally we apply a light effect to the intermediate image to generate the oil painting artwork.