Impractical wall coverings

This is an idea I've been tinkering with for some time, but have never gotten quite right. It's inspired by one of the descriptions of an impressive piece of palace architecture, in typically overblown Barsoomian style, from The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The stones were carried down the walls in an irregular fringe for a few feet, where they appeared to hang like a beautiful and gorgeous drapery... In that single room was a vast treasure equal to the wealth of many a large city.

This isn't at all a literal illustration of the passage (although that might be worth trying too, at some point) but I think I've made some progress with the ridiculous-numbers-of-jewels-set-into-the-wall effect.



Maybe I need to try something with some natural symmetry. One of these days I will dig through my folders of formulas, and find one with a nice repeating tangent function or something, that will give me a series of arch shapes.

Digital to analog conversion

In the latter half of the semester in printmaking, I've been experimenting with a process similar to lithography, which uses simple photocopies as its source material. This means that I can use fractals, and either render individual layers, or do color separation in Photoshop, and then print them in several colors. My initial attempts were just as garish and psychedelic as all the old-school fractals I've been carefully trying not to emulate all these years, but I was able to moderate that a bit by not using straight cyan, magenta, and yellow for the ink colors.

The process is by its nature not very exact, and prone to all sorts of random noise and distortions. But I'm finding the results interesting enough that I think I will try to work with it some more in the fall.

Paper Litho #1


Paper Litho #2


Paper Litho #3


Paper Litho #4