Technique · Fields
Pour cells
The cells and gold lacing of an acrylic pour: ringed, glossy cells of two colour families, dark walls and marbled paint between.
Pour cells 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
- Artists often pass a small torch over a pour: the heat thins the paint and pops its bubbles, which lets the cells open wider.
- Benard cells, the hexagonal convection cells that form in a thin layer of liquid heated from below, are another cellular pattern made by a liquid moving through itself.
- Paint thinned with a pouring medium flows for a long time before it sets, so colours with different densities have minutes to separate into layers and lace.
- In acrylic pouring, cells form when a lighter liquid, usually silicone oil mixed into one colour, rises through the denser paint and spreads sideways, pushing the colours around it into rings.
- Joseph Plateau worked out the rules for soap films in the nineteenth century: films meet three at a time at 120 degrees, which is why the lace between cells meets in threes.
The mathematics
- Every wall between two cells is the perpendicular bisector of the line joining their centres, so a wall lies exactly halfway between the two; the picture rounds the corners with a smooth minimum, -log(sum of e^(-14 d)) / 14, taken over the distances d to all the neighbouring walls.
- The cell size is multiplied by e raised to a slow noise field (scaled by 0.65), so cells grow and shrink smoothly instead of jumping from one size to another.
- The rings inside a cell are bands of distance from its wall, so they follow the cell's shape rather than being circles.
- Cell centres drift on small loops, each at its own slow rate and phase, so the whole tiling shifts continuously without ever tearing.
In art
- Jackson Pollock began pouring and dripping enamel paint onto canvases laid on the floor in 1947.
- Helen Frankenthaler's soak-stain method, from 1952, poured thinned paint onto raw canvas; Morris Louis took it up and poured acrylic down tilted canvases through the 1950s.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
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