Iterative image reconstruction using random cubic bézier strokes

I was doing something related for genuary recently, but with different constraints - I wanted to make a photgraph look painted in a fauvist style, with visible brushstrokes (and a vivid, unrealistic colour scheme). When you're overlaying many, many strokes like that you end up hiding the errors but also hiding the digital brushtrokes; with very few strokes, placement becomes important.

Instead of just stroking with the average colour, I chose to only connect points that were similar in colour (because of the fauvist thing, I was mainly interested in hue; the paints are all intense). By doing this, I was trying to be edge preserving, without explicitly calculation, eg of the Sobel operator.

It kinda worked in that the edges came out clearly; the resulting painting was messy tho; the thick brushstrokes and the colours are intentional, but the brushstrokes going in random directions is not https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/115/894/8... compare to an actual fauvist work, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Delaunay#/media/File:Ro... which still has the 'dithered' look to the face but the strokes are deliberately aligned, I'd fix that if I try again. (Delaunay also uses small strokes for detail, a thing I wasn't going to try in a throwaway program)

An earlier attempt at generating pencil sketches from photos - again, keeping the number of strokes small, and using parallel strokes for hatching - worked much better https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/767/4... (it's just sobel to find edges and a bit of sampling with a filter to decide where to shade)