Abstract: We propose a novel method that automatically analyzes stroke-related artistic styles of paintings. A set of adaptive interfaces are also developed to connect the style analysis with existing painterly rendering systems, so that the specific artistic style of a template painting can be effectively transferred to the input photo with minimal effort. Different from conventional texture-synthesis based rendering techniques that focus mainly on texture features, this work extracts, analyzes and simulates high-level style features expressed by artists' brush stroke techniques. Through experiments, user studies and comparisons with ground truth, we demonstrate that the proposed style-orientated painting framework can significantly reduce tedious parameter adjustment, and it allows amateur users to efficiently create desired artistic styles simply by specifying a template painting.