Technique · Geometry
Abstract portrait
Reads the picture beneath it for where it is dark and light and draws that without copying it: line-scan ridges, contour lines, a shattered net of hatched facets, a halftone spiral, or banknote engraving.
Abstract portrait is drawn geometry, rebuilt as it changes. Every piece on Synapse Drip is made from a recipe that layers techniques like this one, and you can change any of it in the Studio.
Good to know
- Portraits have been made of far less than a photograph for a century: Picasso's faces are a few lines and planes, Warhol's are a photograph pushed to flat colour, and a face in four tones and a few lines is still read at once, because people are better at seeing faces than at seeing almost anything else.
- Human beings see faces in clouds, in the fronts of cars and in the bark of trees, a habit called pareidolia; a face is recognised from the pattern of two dark eyes above a nose and a mouth, so a map of the dark and light is enough.
- A face is found in the first fraction of a second: newborn babies a few hours old already look longer at a face-like pattern of three dark blobs than at the same blobs scrambled.
- The stacked-lines picture is best known from the sleeve of Joy Division's 1979 album Unknown Pleasures: designer Peter Saville took it from a plot of the radio pulses of the pulsar CP 1919 that had appeared in the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy in 1977.
The mathematics
- To hide the far lines behind the near ones, the lines are drawn from the nearest to the farthest, keeping for every column of the picture the highest point so far; a farther line is drawn only where it rises above that envelope. It is the painter's hidden-line trick in one dimension.
In art
- Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures sleeve and Warhol's screen-printed Marilyns are two sides of the same trick: take something the eye knows at once and strip it to a pattern, so that the picture is made of the pattern rather than of the thing.
- Chuck Close made his portraits from a grid of small marks, each one a little abstract painting that only becomes a face from a few metres back; the portrait is there only because of what the eye does with the marks.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
L-system · Space colonisation · Diffusion-limited aggregation · Flow ribbons · Ridgelines · Curve families · Streamlines · Paint strokes