A renderer allows for a flexible and temporally coherent ordering of strokes in the context of stroke-based animation. The relative order of the strokes is specified by the artist or inferred from geometric properties of the scene, such as occlusion, for each frame of a sequence, as a set of stroke pair-wise constraints. Using the received constraints, the strokes are partially ordered for each of the frames. Based on these partial orderings, for each frame, a permutation of the strokes is selected amongst the ones consistent with the frame's partial order, so as to globally improve the perceived temporal coherence of the animation. The sequence of frames can then, for instance, be rendered by ordering the strokes according to the selected set of permutations for the sequence of frames.