Technique · Fields
Radiolarian shell
A Voronoi-tiled sphere that dissolves into shards, with radiating spikes, in white ink on black.
Radiolarian shell 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
- Radiolarian skeletons are made of glassy opaline silica and are usually a fraction of a millimetre across.
- Circogonia icosahedra, a radiolarian Haeckel drew, has a skeleton shaped like a regular icosahedron.
- Radiolarians are among the oldest of the microfossils, and their shells make up deep-sea oozes on parts of the ocean floor.
- Radiolarians are single-celled marine plankton that build glassy skeletons of silica; Ernst Haeckel described them in a monograph in 1862 and drew them again in his Challenger report of 1887 and in Kunstformen der Natur (1899 to 1904).
- Radiolarian skeletons are among the oldest microfossils: they appear in rocks more than 500 million years old.
The mathematics
- No tiling of a sphere by hexagons alone exists: Euler's formula, V - E + F = 2, forces exactly twelve pentagons when the rest are hexagons, as on a football.
- A patch of sphere seen at an angle a from the view axis looks squashed by cos(a), which is why the cells shrink toward the rim.
In art
- Haeckel's lithographs, Kunstformen der Natur (1899 to 1904), fed straight into Art Nouveau; Rene Binet drew on radiolarians for the great gateway of the Paris Exposition of 1900.
- Scientific illustration shaped what people expected nature to look like: Haeckel made his specimens more symmetrical than the living cells.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
Nebula and stars · Liquid · Droplets · Network · Terrain and maps · Neuron · Order to chaos · Fractal tree