# Paint it Black: Generating paintings from text descriptions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.08808 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08808/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05396/) (2016)
- [AttnGAN: Fine-Grained Text to Image Generation with Attentional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10485/) (2017)
- [StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03242/) (2016)
- [A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.06576/) (2015)
- [StackGAN++: Realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10916/) (2017)
- [Pros and Cons of GAN Evaluation Measures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03446/) (2018)
- [Large-scale Classification of Fine-Art Paintings: Learning The Right Metric on The Right Feature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00855/) (2015)
- [Show and Tell: Lessons learned from the 2015 MSCOCO Image Captioning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.06647/) (2016)
- [Semantic Object Accuracy for Generative Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13321/) (2019)
- [Text to Image Generation with Semantic-Spatial Aware GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00567/) (2021)
- [BAM! The Behance Artistic Media Dataset for Recognition Beyond Photography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08614/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Synthetic images aid the recognition of human-made art forgeries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14998/) (2023)
- [Artificial Intelligence for Geometry-Based Feature Extraction, Analysis and Synthesis in Artistic Images: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01450/) (2024)
- [Mimesis, Poiesis, and Imagination: Exploring Text-to-Image Generation of Biblical Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02973/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Two distinct tasks - generating photorealistic pictures from given text prompts and transferring the style of a painting to a real image to make it appear as though it were done by an artist, have been addressed many times, and several approaches have been proposed to accomplish them. However, the intersection of these two, i.e., generating paintings from a given caption, is a relatively unexplored area with little data available. In this paper, we have explored two distinct strategies and have integrated them together. First strategy is to generate photorealistic images and then apply style transfer and the second strategy is to train an image generation model on real images with captions and then fine-tune it on captioned paintings later. These two models are evaluated using different metrics as well as a user study is conducted to get human feedback on the produced results.