Slice and shrink

A study of how shapes could respond to each other.

Algorithm

Inspired by a serie of François Morellet, Pi et plis, 2008 (Pi and folds), the initial action is to divide a plan by random lines. This cutting process works by detecting collisions between the lines. Having noticed that sometimes the cuts are not homogeneous and create very stretched shapes, I added an optional step of pre-cutting the base rectangle from a grid.

The second main step is to shrink each polygon obtained in the first step. We find this way of entangling shapes in many works of Vera Molnár, who skillfully used this compositional process.
Since these shapes are quite basic and mainly concave, we can use the interior angle to move the corner point inside, to do this we calculate each angle of the vertex of the polygon (from the previous, current and next vertex clockwise), with this angle we can move the point along the bisector of the angle. But a limit must be set otherwise the point will meet the opposite segment, this limit is the distance between the point and the centroid of the polygon, beyond a certain threshold the program stops the operation.

The last operation consists in giving a relief, a texture to its shapes, for that the program is going to move points on both sides of the board by slightly curving their trajectory with a Perlin noise, these bands can be horizontal, vertical or diagonal (two possible choices, go down to the right or to the left).

This step might seem superfluous but it brings a light vibration to this arbitrary and conceptual composition, it comes to support the uncertain character of this arrangement since what is given to see here is the destruction of a rectangle which for me is an archetypal form of the painting.

Features

Pre-cut from a grid: indicates whether the initial composition will be split (>1) or not (1), the values are between 1 and 3 for the columns and 1 and 4 for the rows.

Cuts: the number of random lines that will divide the composition (between 6 and 13)

Initial margin between contours: the initial space between the contours of the same shape, between 14 and 22. Each time the shape is shrunk, this value is multiplied by 0.92.

Fill slice: three ways to draw polygons

• minimal / 0.2% probability / first contour of each polygon
• solid / 49.9% chance / first and last contour + corner lines
• complete / 49.9% likelihood / every contour of the shrinking process + corner lines

Stripe margin: the distance between doodled (colored) lines, between 4 and 8.

Stripe color: the color of the doodled lines (with the Stabilo© reference), 14 possibles choices

Capture and plotter drawing

You can download a PNG or SVG from the live mode, by clicking on the drawing a window will open where you can change the size of the drawing, download a bitmap or vector image. You are free to reproduce the picture, if you decide to reproduce it with a plotter, please note that the colors used are Stabilo© 88 (Fineliners 0.4)

Hybrid series

Slice and shrink is part of Hybrid Series, To learn more, open the link in the live mode option window.