Pointillism is a style of painting in which small distinct points of primary colors create the impression of a wide selection of secondary colors.

A postimpressionist school of painting exemplified by Georges Seurat and his followers in late 19th-century France, characterized by the application of paint in small dots and brush strokes.

Divisionism
The technique relies on the perceptive ability of the eye and mind of the viewer to mix the color spots into a fuller range of tones, and is related closely to Divisionism, a more technical variant of the method.

Seurat, Signac, and Cross
It is a style with few serious practitioners, and is notably seen in the works of Seurat, Signac, and Cross. The term itself was first coined by art critics in the late 1880s to ridicule the works of these artists, and is now used without its earlier mocking connotation.

Practice of Pointillism
The practice of Pointillism is in sharp contrast to the more common method of blending pigments on a palette or using the many commercially-available premixed colors.

The latter is analogous to the CMYK or four-color printing process used by personal color printers and large presses; Pointillism is analogous instead to the process used by computer monitors and television sets to produce colors.

Exploring Art Style

If red, blue and green light are mixed (the additive primaries) we get something close to white light.

The brighter effect of pointillist colours could rise from the fact that subtractive mixing is avoided and something closer to the effect of additive mixing is obtained even through pigments.

The brushwork used to perform pointillistic color mixing is at the expense of traditional brushwork which could be used to delineate texture.

Medium

Pointillism is usually done in oil painting. Oil paint is used because it's thick and doesn't bleed or run. The idea behind pointillism is to not physically mix colors, so if the paint bled it would not be good.

Oil paint is made by mixing oil (usually linseed oil) with pigments.

Many pigments are minerals. Oil is added because it makes the pigment easier to apply and it holds the dry particles of pigment together.

Artists used to hand-mix their own paint, but now the mixing is usually done mechanically.