Rendering artistic brush strokes

Hi everyone,

I’m relatively new to OpenGL programming and am looking for ideas on how to render artistic brush strokes. By that I mean brushes with an alpha channel, varying opacity and color. Bumpmaps for texture would be a plus! Anyone who’s used Photoshop or Painter probably knows what I mean.

I’ve made a little program based on the OpenGL superbible that uses DrawPixels to paint, but I’m not sure if that’s going in the wrong direction.

Perhaps anyone knows of a simple opensource application with this feature or a tutorial I can have a look at… The Gimp is a bit unwieldy, I’ve no idea where to look!
Some hints to get me started would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Stefan

Probably overkill for a beginner, but on http://download.developer.nvidia.com/developer/SDK/Individual_Samples/samples.html check this out: http://download.developer.nvidia.com/developer/SDK/Individual_Samples/DEMOS/OpenGL/paint.zip