Technique · Fields
Paper-cut layers
Stacked sheets of coloured paper cut to noise outlines, with soft drop shadows, lit edges and punched dots.
Paper-cut layers 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
- Lotte Reiniger made animated films from cut-paper silhouettes in the 1920s; The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) is the oldest surviving animated feature.
- Cut-paper traditions run through China (jianzhi), Mexico (papel picado), Poland (wycinanki) and Germany (Scherenschnitt), and each has its own patterns.
- The oldest surviving paper cuttings, found in the Turpan region of Xinjiang in China, date from around the fifth or sixth century.
- Stacked cut card, one sheet per contour, is a classic way to build a model of a landscape.
The mathematics
- A shadow blurred over a wider area imitates a light of finite size: the further a sheet floats above the next, the wider the blur, as it would for real sheets, and this piece has 11.
- Slicing a height field at evenly spaced heights gives nested regions, which is also how a contour map is drawn.
In art
- In his last years Henri Matisse made large cut-outs from painted paper and called it drawing with scissors.
- Paper sculptors build depth from many thin layers, each a little different from the last.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
Nebula and stars · Liquid · Droplets · Network · Terrain and maps · Neuron · Order to chaos · Fractal tree