Technique · Fields
Watercolour leaf emblem
Leaves glazed in watercolour along a spiral around a shell-like eye, with a warm glow, vines and splatter.
Watercolour leaf emblem is a field drawn for every pixel by the graphics chip. 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
- A drying wash leaves a darker rim where pigment is carried to its edge, the same coffee-ring effect that stains a table under a spilled drop.
- Leaves, seeds and petals often follow the golden angle of about 137.5 degrees around a stem, which packs them with the least overlap.
- In wet-on-wet painting, colours bleed into each other on damp paper, which is what the halo around each leaf imitates.
- Watercolour is transparent pigment in gum arabic: the white of the paper provides all the light, which is why watercolourists leave white areas unpainted rather than adding white paint.
The mathematics
- Colour multiplies: a glaze that passes (r1, g1, b1) of the light over one that passes (r2, g2, b2) passes (r1 r2, g1 g2, b1 b2), which is why overlaps are deeper than either leaf.
- Each leaf is a lens: its half-width follows w sin(pi u^0.8) along its length u from 0 to 1, a curve that is zero at both ends and widest near the middle.
- 46 leaves over 1.60 turns put one every 12.52 degrees of the spiral; the golden angle, 137.5 degrees, would spread them with the least overlap.
In art
- Maria Sibylla Merian recorded plants and insects in watercolour; her book on the insects of Suriname, published in 1705, is still admired.
- Leaves set round a centre recur in heraldry, in the laurel wreaths of ancient Greece and Rome, and in Art Nouveau ornament.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
Nebula and stars · Liquid · Droplets · Network · Terrain and maps · Neuron · Order to chaos · Fractal tree