AbstractEmbroidery is a traditional handicraft of sewing stitches into fabric or other materials in different patterns, and this ancient non‐photorealistic art form has not drawn enough attention thus far. In this paper, we present an image‐based method to simulate the traditional embroidery art. The method combines stroke‐based rendering techniques with the Phong lighting model to create picturesque embroidery‐like images. We first build a 3D stitch model and derive some most commonly used stitch patterns from it. Then we preprocess the input image by segmenting it into regions, from which the parameters to specify stitch patterns are obtained. Finally, we apply stitches back onto the desired regions and render them under a virtual light source. Experimental results show that our method, different from the existing schemes, is capable of performing fine embroidery simulations with the effects of lighting and shading based on an input image. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.