Total variation denoising can be used to produce cartoonish images; that is, piecewise-constant images, as demonstrated. The more we increase the weight, the flatter the textures (at the expense of fidelity to the input image):

image = io.imread('../images/me18.jpg')
pylab.figure(figsize=(10,14))
pylab.subplot(221), pylab.imshow(image), pylab.axis('off'), pylab.title('original', size=20)
denoised_img = denoise_tv_chambolle(image, weight=0.1, multichannel=True)
pylab.subplot(222), pylab.imshow(denoised_img), pylab.axis('off'), pylab.title('TVD (wt=0.1)', size=20)
denoised_img = denoise_tv_chambolle(image, weight=0.2, multichannel=True)
pylab.subplot(223), pylab.imshow(denoised_img), pylab.axis('off'), pylab.title('TVD (wt=0.2)', size=20)
denoised_img = denoise_tv_chambolle(image, weight=0.3, multichannel=True)
pylab.subplot(224), pylab.imshow(denoised_img), pylab.axis('off'), pylab.title('TVD (wt=0.3)', size=20)
pylab.show()

The following image shows the output of the preceding code block, with the flat-texture images obtained with total variation denoising using different weights. The greater the weight, the flatter the texture becomes: