Detail from Seurat's La Parade de Cirque (1889), showing the contrasting dots of paint used in pointillism.

Paul Signac, Femmes au Puits, 1892, showing a detail with constituent colours.

Pointillism is a way of painting in which small separate dots of pure color are used to form images. The artist paints the picture with hundreds of tiny dots, mainly of red, yellow, blue and green, with white. The eye and mind of the viewer mix the colours to make different shades of these colours, as well as orange, purple, pink, and brown depending on the way the dots of colour are arranged.