Technique · Fields
Quilled forest
A landscape of coiled strips: spiralling clouds and round tree crowns, each a coil of one colour with a thin dark gap between the turns.
Quilled forest 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
- Felt, yarn and paper coils have been used in folk art for centuries: Mongolian felt-makers, Dutch paper cutters and Victorian quillers all built pictures out of simple repeated units.
- Friedensreich Hundertwasser, the Austrian painter, made the spiral a signature of his work from the 1950s, and wrote against the straight line and for curves that follow nature.
- A spiral appears wherever something grows by adding to its edge: ferns unroll in one, a snail adds a whorl at a time, and the arms of a galaxy and the curl of a wave all follow one.
- Quilling, the art of rolling thin strips of paper into coils and gluing them on edge, is thought to date from the Renaissance, when monks and nuns in Europe used it to decorate religious objects; it was a fashionable pastime in 18th-century England.
- The rings of a tree trunk record its years: A. E. Douglass, an American astronomer, turned this into the science of dendrochronology in the early 1900s, dating timbers by the pattern of wide and narrow rings.
The mathematics
- Each cloud is a spiral about its centre: with r the distance from the centre and a the angle, the coordinate that counts turns is u = r times 5.60 plus a / (2 pi) times the number of arms, and a dark line is drawn wherever u is a whole number.
- The sky is a Voronoi diagram, which Georgy Voronoy studied in 1908: every point belongs to its nearest centre, and cells are separated by straight lines halfway between centres, though noise bends them here.
- Crowns are discs with a wavy radius, r(a) = R (1 + small noise in the angle a), filled with concentric turns spaced by R / 9.00; a spiral must have a whole number of arms or the turns would not join up behind themselves.
In art
- Landscape in wool and paper has become a popular modern craft, from needle-felted woods to quilled fields; every tree is the same simple coil, repeated at different sizes and colours.
- Gustav Klimt's landscapes of orchards and beech woods turn foliage into carpets of small marks, and a forest of coils plays the same game of pattern against depth.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
Nebula and stars · Liquid · Droplets · Network · Terrain and maps · Neuron · Order to chaos · Fractal tree