Technique · Fields
Wave layers
Stacked bands of cut paper with wavy edges, lit from crest to foot and shadowing the layer behind, in shades of one colour.
Wave layers 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
- Layered paper art builds depth from shadows: the gap between sheets is often only a few millimetres, but a raking light turns it into a dark line.
- The folds of a theatre curtain or of a landscape of sand dunes show the same trick, where each fold has a lit side and a shaded side.
- The Danish artist Peter Callesen cuts sculptures out of single sheets of paper, and the shadow a cut layer casts is often as much the subject as the paper.
- Paper-cut layered art, sometimes called papercut shadow boxes, glues many sheets one above another with small gaps, so that light and shadow give each layer depth.
- Sand dunes make this shape too: the wind pushes sand up the gentle side of a dune and it slumps down the steep side, so every dune is a layer with a crest.
The mathematics
- Each layer's edge is y = base + A (sin(kx + p) + 0.55 sin(1.7 kx + 1.4 p) + 0.3 sin(0.45 kx - 0.6 p)); with 8 layers, shifting every phase by a random amount makes each pair of neighbours cross-hatch the picture in different places.
- The shadow on the layer behind is exp(-distance above the edge / reach), a smooth fall-off that imitates a soft light source; making it long and dark turns thin steps into deep gaps.
- The highlight on a crest depends on the angle of the edge: the surface normal is (-slope, 1), and its dot product with the light direction picks out the places where the paper faces the light.
In art
- Soft gradients and stacked wave shapes in one hue became a common background style in graphic design in the 2010s.
- Single-colour art, in which every shade is a tint or shadow of one hue, is called monochrome, and its range of tones depends entirely on how the light falls.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
Nebula and stars · Liquid · Droplets · Network · Terrain and maps · Neuron · Order to chaos · Fractal tree