Technique · Fields
Natural-history plate
Specimens on black drawn as fine engraving: nets, ribbed spindles, spotted spheres, rosettes and geodesic bulbs in cream ink.
Natural-history plate 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
- Engravers made tone with lines: the closer or thicker the lines, the darker the area; cream on black reverses that, with ink where the light falls.
- Marine microorganisms such as radiolarians and foraminifera were drawn in great numbers in the nineteenth century, as better microscopes revealed how intricate they are.
- Engraved plates were printed from cut or etched copper, and the finest hatching lines could lie a fraction of a millimetre apart.
- Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (1899 to 1904) printed one hundred plates of living forms, many of them marine creatures and several on dark grounds, and helped make natural forms a source for design.
The mathematics
- A flat net drawn on a sphere has to be squeezed toward the edge: lattice coordinates are divided by 0.38 + 0.62 z, where z is how far the surface faces the viewer, so cells shrink as the surface turns away.
- Three families of parallel lines at 60 degrees to each other make a triangular lattice, the way of tiling a plane with equal triangles.
- Meridian lines on a ribbed form are spaced equally in the angle asin(x / w), not in x, so they crowd toward the edges, as ribs do on a real spindle.
- Each specimen is lit from one direction; its tone is 0.18 + 0.82 max(n . L, 0) for a surface normal n and light direction L, and the width of each line follows that tone.
In art
- Plates in natural-history books were often drawn by one artist, engraved by another and coloured by a third.
- A black ground, with the specimen floating in darkness, suggests the deep sea or the microscope, whatever the subject.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
Nebula and stars · Liquid · Droplets · Network · Terrain and maps · Neuron · Order to chaos · Fractal tree