Abstract: We present a new painterly rendering method that simulates artists' content-dependent painting process and the natural variation of hand-painted strokes. First, a new stroke layout strategy is proposed to enhance the contrast between large and small paint strokes, which is an important characteristic of hand-painted paintings. Specifically, the input image is partitioned into nonuniform grids according to its importance map, and determined by the grid size, an individually constructed paint stroke is applied in each grid. Second, an anisotropic digital brush is designed to simulate a real paint brush. In particular, each bristle of the digital brush has an individual color, so that strokes rendered by the new brush can have multiple colors and naturally varied textures. Finally, we present a novel method to add lighting effects to the canvas. This lighting imitation method is robust and very easy to implement, and it can significantly improve the quality of rendering. Comparing with traditional painterly rendering approaches, the new method simulates more closely the real painting procedure, and our experimental results show that it can produce vivid paintings with fewer artifacts