Technique · Fields
Neurographic cells
Rounded black ink lines dividing the page into organic cells, each filled with a watercolour wash or a zentangle pattern.
Neurographic cells 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
- Voronoi-like patterns turn up all over nature: the cells of a dragonfly wing, the patches of a giraffe's coat, cracks in drying mud and the territories of fish nests all divide space by nearest centre.
- In 1854 the physician John Snow mapped deaths from cholera in London's Soho and drew a line round the houses closer to the Broad Street pump than to any other, an early use of what we now call a Voronoi diagram.
- Some watercolour pigments, such as ultramarine and burnt umber, are made of coarser particles that settle into the hollows of the paper as it dries, giving the granulated look of a real wash.
- Zentangle, a method of drawing repeating patterns inside the sections of a page, was founded by Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas in Whitinsville, Massachusetts, in the early 2000s (2004 is the date most often given).
- Neurographic art, which turns a tangle of crossing lines into rounded joints and fills the spaces with colour, was developed by the Russian psychologist Pavel Piskarev, usually dated to 2014, as a relaxation and problem-solving exercise.
The mathematics
- Every cell is the set of points nearest to one of about 28 scattered centres; the boundary between two cells is exactly halfway between their centres, so the distance to the ink line is found by comparing a cell with its neighbours.
- Where several boundaries meet, the joint is rounded by a soft minimum, min(a, b) = -k ln(e^(-a/k) + e^(-b/k)), which equals the ordinary minimum far from the joint and curves smoothly near it, as a pen would.
- The wash is a blend of three colours across the sheet; granulation is noise at two scales multiplying the colour, and pigment pooling is the colour darkened by exp(-distance / 0.03) near each ink line.
In art
- Zentangle and neurographic drawing are meditative practices as much as art forms: the rule is to draw one line at a time and never erase, so that the page records a calm hand.
- The look of black lines enclosing coloured cells recalls stained glass, whose lead strips hold pieces of coloured glass in the same way, and the cloisonne enamels of Byzantium and China.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
Nebula and stars · Liquid · Droplets · Network · Terrain and maps · Neuron · Order to chaos · Fractal tree