Technique · Fields
Faces
Invented faces from a few proportions, lit like a portrait: randomize for a new person, mutate for relatives. Also a source for portrait stylizers.
Faces 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
- People see faces in clouds, toast and electrical sockets; the habit is called pareidolia.
- Newborns look longer at face-like patterns than at the same dots scrambled, within hours of birth.
- Renaissance artists taught that the face divides into three equal bands: hairline to brows, brows to nose, nose to chin; real faces vary around that rule.
- A cat's eyes shine in headlights because of a mirror-like layer behind the retina, the tapetum lucidum.
- In 1973 the statistician Herman Chernoff proposed drawing data as cartoon faces, because people notice small changes in a face better than almost anything else.
- Faces with larger eyes, a higher forehead and a smaller chin read as younger: the proportions of a baby's face, which the ethologist Konrad Lorenz described in 1943.
The mathematics
- The eyes sit about halfway down a head, a proportion that beginners often get wrong.
- The relief is lit by the dot product of its surface normal with the light direction, which is Lambert's cosine law from 1760.
- A face with five numbers for width, jaw, brow, nose and mouth already spans a huge space: ten values for each give a hundred thousand faces.
In art
- Giuseppe Arcimboldo painted portraits made of fruit, flowers and fish in the 1560s.
- Chuck Close built huge portraits from grids of small marks, a method in the same spirit as this one.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
Nebula and stars · Liquid · Droplets · Network · Terrain and maps · Neuron · Order to chaos · Fractal tree