Deep learning model for Chinese watercolor painting creation
Lin Qi · PeerJ Computer Science · 2025
Chinese watercolor painting, celebrated for its delicate brushwork, smooth tonal gradients, and expressive ink diffusion, embodies a rich historical and cultural heritage. This article introduces a hierarchical multi-scale generative framework for producing high-quality traditional watercolor paintings. The model is trained on a curated collection of high-resolution artworks from public museum archives and employs a pyramid of patch-based generative adversarial networks (GANs), each dedicated to learning visual features at a specific spatial scale. Residual learning across scales enables progressive refinement from coarse composition to intricate brushstroke details. Quantitative evaluation using Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) and Diversity Score shows significant performance gains over other well-known GAN-based models. Qualitative results further demonstrate the framework’s ability to emulate the stylistic nuances of classical Chinese art, capturing brushwork precision, ink diffusion effects, and compositional harmony, while preserving both global structure and local texture.