I found some beautiful scatter plots of famous art and took it as a challenge to recreate them! I naturally turned to Matplotlib to graph the colors as 3D Positions. Each colored plane shows which color increases when you move away from the plane, e.g when a point moves up, away from the blue plane, the point becomes more blue.

Salvador Dalí The Persistence of Memory
The Persistence of Memory, 1931
Salvador Dalí Scatter Plot
Salvador Dalí
Vincent Van Gogh, 'Self-Portrait'
'Self-Portrait', 1889
Van Gogh plot
Vincent Van Gogh

Usage: I used Python’s ArgumentParser to make my tool easier to use. An example use:

python PlotImage.py *.jpg --points 20000 --pprint

This plots all Jpeg images using at most 20,000 points from the image. It pretty-prints the plot by removing axis labels, titles, and doesn’t draw the original image. It also uses other optional flags such as –save to save the plotted images and –nodisplay, which runs the program without drawing to the screen.

Here’s an example without pretty-print turned on:

3D Plot of The Scream
Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893