Tutorial: How To Make Any Texture Look Painterly In Blender

If you’re interested in creating stylized 3D art, a new tutorial from SouthernShotty is worth checking out. Inspired by the Kuwahara compositor effect, his material works directly in the Shader Editor, which means your textures can have a painted look before you add lighting, compositing, or other NPR effects.

SouthernShotty explains how to build the entire system from scratch, showing how it samples nearby pixels, finds smoother areas, and uses those colors to create painterly shapes. He also turns the setup into a reusable node group with a simple intensity control.

Just be warned: the video opens with some Minecraft footage. For those who want to go further, SouthernShotty has other videos on painterly 3D, including a guide on creating a stylized fur and feather system: