Technique · Fields
Deco facets
A collage of gilded and brown shapes, fans, rings, crescents and slanted bands, ruled in stripes, with shadows and bevelled edges.
Deco facets 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 discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 set off a craze for Egyptian motifs, and stepped shapes, fans and gold appear in Deco cinemas, jewellery and ceramics.
- The Chrysler Building in New York, finished in 1930, ends in a crown of stainless-steel arcs and triangular windows that form a sunburst.
- Tamara de Lempicka, the Polish-born painter of 1920s Paris, gave her portraits the hard, polished, faceted look that the style is remembered for, a look that owes something to Cubism, begun by Picasso and Braque around 1908.
- Art Deco takes its name from the 1925 Exposition internationale des arts decoratifs et industriels modernes in Paris; it favoured geometry, sunbursts, stripes and gold.
- Gold leaf is beaten so thin, about a tenth of a micrometre, that it crinkles at the touch of a breath, and a single gram of gold can be beaten into a sheet covering about half a square metre.
The mathematics
- Each shape is a signed distance function, negative inside: a fan is the larger of (distance from the centre minus the radius) and (the angle's size minus the fan's half-angle) times the distance, a ring segment the same cut from a band; there are 34 of them, drawn back to front.
- A shadow is the same shape moved a little away from the light and blurred by smoothstep, drawn first so that it darkens only what lies beneath; the bevel is the dot product of the direction in which the distance grows with the direction of the light, evaluated just inside the edge.
- Stripes are fract(s), where s is a coordinate that runs across the shape (the angle for a fan, the distance for a ring), times 7.00, so the bands radiate or ring round without any drawing.
In art
- Sonia Delaunay's coloured discs of the 1910s, such as Electric Prisms (1914), and her fabrics of the 1920s carried the language of overlapping geometric shapes from painting into clothes and interiors.
- Gold paper, gilded wood and enamelled metal are the materials of the style; a collage of cut gold shapes hints at the lacquer panels and screens of Deco furniture.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
Nebula and stars · Liquid · Droplets · Network · Terrain and maps · Neuron · Order to chaos · Fractal tree