Technique · Geometry
Curl-stroke portrait
Redraws the layers below as thousands of small curls, rings or dashes that follow the contours: a portrait made of swirls.
Curl-stroke 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
- In 2005 Robert Bosch and Craig Kaplan made portraits from a single closed line that visits thousands of points, calling it TSP art.
- Pen-and-ink hatching follows the form of the thing it describes, a technique the engravers of the Renaissance perfected.
- Turning strokes to follow the form is how pen-and-ink illustrators and engravers suggest volume; it is called cross-contour hatching.
- Placing the strokes evenly, rather than at random, avoids clumps and gaps: it is the same dart-throwing idea used to sample images for graphics.
The mathematics
- Each curl winds 1.70 turns, a short piece of a spiral, and is rotated to run along the picture's lines of equal brightness, perpendicular to its steepest slope.
- A strand placed evenly rather than at random leaves no gaps and makes no clumps, the same idea as dart throwing for sampling images.
In art
- Scribble drawings turn tone into texture: the darker the place, the denser the marks.
- Drawing a picture in a single kind of mark makes the mark itself the subject, as with Seurat's dots or Van Gogh's dashes.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
L-system · Space colonisation · Diffusion-limited aggregation · Flow ribbons · Ridgelines · Curve families · Streamlines · Paint strokes