An important aspect of robotic painting is replicating human painting techniques onmachines, in order to automatically produce artwork or to interact with a human painter. Usually,painterly rendering techniques are transferred to the machine, and strokes are used as the basicbuilding block of an image, as they can easily be mapped to the robot. In contrast, we propose toconsider regions as a basic primitive to achieve more human-like results and to make the paintingprocess more modular. We analyze the works of Kadinsky, Mondrian, Delaunay, and van Gogh toshow the basis of region-based techniques in the real world and then transfer them to an automaticcontext. We introduce different types of region primitives and show procedures for how to realizethem on our painting machine e-David, capable of painting with visual feedback. Finally, wepresent machine-created artwork by painting automatically generated sets of shapes in the styles ofvarious artists.