Technique · Fields
Scales, petals and cones
Overlapping scales and petals lit as relief: fish scales, peacock-feather eyes, rings of pointed petals, a pine cone seen from the side, a chameleon's tail coiled in a spiral, or a mandala of quilled paper.
Scales, petals and cones 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
- The scales of most fish grow by adding a ring at a time, and counting these rings (circuli) lets fish scientists tell the age of a fish, much as tree rings tell the age of a tree.
- The scales of a fish grow from pockets in the deeper layer of the skin, not from its surface, and a fish that loses scales grows them back.
The mathematics
- Rows of scales offset by half a scale and each overlapping a third to a half of the row below tile the plane without gaps; the arrangement is the same one that makes a brick wall and the hexagonal packing of circles, with the circles allowed to overlap.
In art
- Overlapping scales are among the oldest of repeating decorations: roof tiles, Roman mosaic fish-scale floors, Japanese seigaiha waves and Art Deco scalloped walls all build a surface from many small overlapping curves.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
Nebula and stars · Liquid · Droplets · Network · Terrain and maps · Neuron · Order to chaos · Fractal tree