This paper presents a new method for the automatic painterly rendering. This method synthesizes an impressive image with a handcrafted look from a source image such as a photograph. This method generates rectangular brush strokes approximating the local regions of the source image with suitable locations, orientations, and sizes. These properties are calculated with the image moments of the color difference images, obtained by taking the differences between the local source images and the stroke colors. The method explicitly deals with not only intensity but also chromaticity of the source image. The resulting image is composited with smaller strokes at the details while its flat regions are painted with larger ones. The method is also able to control the density of strokes as well as their painting order based on their sizes. The density is controlled by a dithering method with space-filling curves. Painting process starts from the larger strokes and finishes with the finer ones. Bec...