The technology described herein is directed to a reinforcement learning based framework for training a natural media agent to learn a rendering policy without human supervision or labeled datasets. The reinforcement learning based framework feeds the natural media agent a training dataset to implicitly learn the rendering policy by exploring a canvas and minimizing a loss function. Once trained, the natural media agent can be applied to any reference image to generate a series (or sequence) of continuous-valued primitive graphic actions, e.g., sequence of painting strokes, that when rendered by a synthetic rendering environment on a canvas, reproduce an identical or transformed version of the reference image subject to limitations of an action space and the learned rendering policy.