Technique · Geometry
Paint strokes
Thousands of brush strokes laid along a swirling flow, in clumps of paint with thick-paint shadows and vortex eyes.
Paint strokes is drawn geometry, rebuilt as it changes. 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
- Van Gogh painted The Starry Night in 1889 at the asylum of Saint-Remy, from memory, taking the view from his east-facing window as its starting point.
- Claude Monet and the Impressionists used broken colour: short touches of unmixed paint that blend in the viewer's eye.
- Impasto means paint laid on thickly enough that the brush marks stand in relief.
- A 2008 study found that the fluctuations of brightness in van Gogh's late swirling paintings follow the statistics of real turbulence.
The mathematics
- A stroke along a flow is a short piece of a streamline: the brush keeps its direction from a field that varies smoothly, so neighbouring strokes lean the same way.
- Thick paint is faked with a soft shadow: where one stroke lies over another, the lower one darkens by an amount that falls off with distance, like a ridge of paint.
In art
- Impasto was used by Rembrandt for the highlights in a face long before the Impressionists used it for everything.
- Painting with a limited vocabulary of marks, as here, is how a style is made: repetition with variation.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
L-system · Space colonisation · Diffusion-limited aggregation · Flow ribbons · Ridgelines · Curve families · Streamlines · Stipple and Delaunay portrait