Mike Lyon

Painting Drawing Printmaking Japanese Woodblock Printing Furniture Lighting

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Small drawings with square spirals

October 30, 2018 By Mike Lyon

Why spirals? Because I can vary the density of my lines in any area without cross-hatching and without lifting the pen. This lends itself to the kind of repeating procedures (program) I’ve been thinking about for quite some time. But curving spirals (where the radius of the circle being drawn continuously expands from or contracts toward the center) don’t fit nicely no matter how cleverly you arrange them – they always either overlap or leave empty spots. So I coded rectangular spirals where the line started at the center of the “tile-space” and the line continued to turn and lengthen until the segment hit the perimeter of the tile:

Here’s an image of my screen input as of January, 2019:

spiral generation input screen as of Jan 2019

I could communicate an image by controlling my input parameters so the image was drawn in a single layer of spiral tiles, and/or I could overlap the tiles horizontally and/or vertically, and/or I could draw multiple layers of tiles in colors and I could overlay tiles of different diameters. I experimented and produced a number of interesting-to-me drawings using ink and paint and woodcut. Here are some of the drawings I made between July and October.

2018-10-10 “Hal on gray” 22×15 inches, ink on pigment-tinted paper
2018-10-30 “Elena” 22×15 inches, ink on paper
2018-10-29 “Elena” 22×15 inches, ink on paper
2018-10-31 “Elena” 22×15 inches, ink on paper
2018-11 “Dana & Scott Stolen Skateboard” 22×15 inches, ink on paper
2018-11-23 “Mom on blue” 22×15 inches, ink on pingment-tinted paper
2018-11 “Linda” 22×15 inches, ink on paper
2018-11-05 “Dana and Scott Dancing” 22×15 inches, ink on paper
2018-11-07 “Elena” 22×15 inches, ink on paper
2018-11-07 “Scott and Dana” 22×15 inches, ink on paper
2018-11-24 “Linda on pink” 22×15 inches, ink on pigment-tinted paper
2018-10 Jessica Red Robe 22 x 15 inches with detail
2019-10 “Jim” the red spirals going down over yellow and blue (using AxiDraw)
2018-10-24 “Jim” 22×15 inches, ink on paper
2018-10-28 “Jessica” 15×22 inches, ink on paper

Filed Under: Drawing, Featured

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