Technique · Geometry
Stipple and Delaunay portrait
Redraws the layers below as evenly spaced dots, a Delaunay triangle mesh, or both: darkness becomes density.
Stipple and Delaunay 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
- Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884 to 1886) is built from dots of unmixed colour that the eye blends.
- Francesco Bartolozzi popularised stipple engraving in London in the 1760s and 1770s.
- The Wall Street Journal has run hand-stippled portraits, known as hedcuts, since 1979.
- Stippling, shading with dots alone, is a craft of engravers and scientific illustrators; in 2002 Adrian Secord showed how to place the dots by weighted Voronoi relaxation.
- A Delaunay triangulation maximises the smallest angle of its triangles; Boris Delaunay described it in 1934 using spheres that contain no other point.
The mathematics
- Blue noise has no low-frequency energy, which is why it looks even without being a grid: no clumps and no gaps.
- A triangulation of 5,200 points has at most 3n - 6 edges, so here at most 15,594 lines join the points.
In art
- A portrait made of nothing but dots asks the viewer to do half the work, which is why it feels alive.
- Pointillism relies on optical mixing: dots of different colours placed side by side blend into a new colour at a distance.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
L-system · Space colonisation · Diffusion-limited aggregation · Flow ribbons · Ridgelines · Curve families · Streamlines · Paint strokes