Color By Numbers

We have all been rasterized and reduced to pixels that live on each other’s screens.

Which got me thinking about how much of what we see is really a trick of the eye in pixel graphics.

And thinking about the long history of this kind of abstraction underlying our perception of smooth imagery, usually done for the purposes of mass production

Many of these mass production methods have been recycled back into the fine arts world, see Roy Lichtenstein and Chuck Close . . .

And I got to playing around with a simple method in Dynamo to take regular photo inputs and convert them to the familiar CMYK color space for physical printing

so that I could decompose any image and recompose it in a new format

One that has multiple readings, from the up close to the resolved distance view

And then making more of a physicality or requirement for presence to really see the drawings at multiple levels

And trying to get a range of drawings, one that is seen from a distance, on that is seen in extreme close up and all the ranges in between

And then thinking about how to you go about sharing this experience with people with whom you aren’t physically present.

Production of these images created an issue, usually you see pen plotters at high speed

But the reality is that they 

                                                are

                                                       in 

                                                            fact

                                                                very 

                                                                    slow

So I went about experimenting with a kind of cursive script to create variable density of lines

Trying continuous and discontinuous drawing styles

The first tries were a bit blocky

But they got smoother

Images need to be refined to work with this method. I took emojis as a starting point.

Revit is really the only decent output method I've found, with each color layer having many thousands of NURBS curves, or single curves with thousands of control points.

But then starting to get the idea of multiple paintings in one, and also the speed of the more continuous line

(of course, if you're going to do a peach you need to do an eggplant)

Pushing the method a little further, this one is done with a single continuous 3rd degree NURBS curve spiraling through 12,000 control points

And the most recent drawing with a discontinuous spiral in 4 parts.

A Sample Dynamo File if you want to give it a try