Abstract: An artist usually does not draw all the areas in a picture homogeneously but tries to make the work more expressive by emphasizing what is important while eliminating irrelevant details. Creating expressive painterly images with such accentuation effect remains to be a challenge because of the subjectivity of information selection. This paper presents a novel technique for automatically converting an input image into a pencil drawing with such emphasis and elimination effect. The proposed technique utilizes saliency map, a computational model for visual attention, to predict the focus of attention in the input image. A new level of detail controlling algorithm using multi-resolution pyramid is also developed for locally adapting the rendering parameters, such as the density, orientation and width of pencil strokes, to the degree of attention defined by saliency map. Experimental results show that the images generated with the proposed method present the visual effect similar to that of the real pencil drawing and can successfully direct the viewer's attention toward the focus.