Spiraling toward completion

I’m halfway done with my spiral.

My best guess is that it’s tak­en about fifty hours (not count­ing the time it took to devel­op the 2.5 giga­byte gra­dat­ed spi­ral pat­tern I’ve been mod­i­fy­ing) sit­ting here in front of the mon­i­tor with the Intuos2 sty­lus in hand, draw­ing over the line pat­tern to cre­ate this hand-drawn halftone. I’ve fol­lowed one of the arms of the spi­ral around the cen­ter 400 times to get to the very mid­dle. The next step is to start over at the out­side and work my way in again using the oth­er arm of the spi­ral. I’m prob­a­bly about fifty hours away, then, from fin­ish­ing this pat­tern so that I can start cre­at­ing images from these irreg­u­lar spi­ral patterns.

I could­n’t have done it with­out using an adjust­ment lay­er in Pho­to­shop to increase the con­trast and show me only the inner­most line with very lit­tle of the gra­da­tion between wind­ings. As I wrote in A Lit­tle Slice of a Big Spi­ral star­ing at this pat­tern for pro­longed peri­ods of time real­ly hurts the eyes. Turn­ing the mon­i­tor to its dimmest set­ting and increas­ing the appar­ent con­trast made it pos­si­ble for me to sit for hours at a time on this file while tak­ing rea­son­ably short breaks to rest my eyes.

And what is the point of all this? To the right is a crude exam­ple of the sort of graph­ic qual­i­ty a pat­tern like this can pro­duce on a small scale. As the source for my image I used the sketch from the fourth Name That Celebri­ty Sketch and applied only the inner­most cen­ter of the spi­ral. If you step back or blur your eyes (I don’t have any choice about blur­ring my eyes any­more) you can see the face, but it is built up from the ragged spi­ral. Even­tu­al­ly this will be used on a much larg­er scale, to cre­ate a pho­to­graph­ic image made from some very un-pho­to­graph­ic tex­tured lines.

The high res­o­lu­tion of the pat­tern file means that I could the­o­ret­i­cal­ly work on an image up to twen­ty-five feet square with this image. In actu­al­i­ty I’ll have to stay with­in the out­er cir­cle, restrict­ing me to a max­i­mum square of sev­en­teen and a half feet on a side, with some more on one side if I decrease the oth­er dimen­sion. Because I work at a high­er res­o­lu­tion than my final out­put in order to take advan­tage of antialias­ing from the down­sam­pling process, my max­i­mum size will real­ly be some­thing clos­er to five feet on a side if I decide that the cen­ter of the spi­ral will be at the cen­ter of the image. The loca­tion of the cen­ter of the final spi­ral may cut my final max­i­mum size down far­ther, but I might be able to work with a lit­tle less res­o­lu­tion and still have the file be of enough greater res­o­lu­tion than the final out­put, which would give me some wig­gle room on my final max­i­mum size.

This may seem com­pli­cat­ed and eso­teric, but the final result is that that I’ll be able to cre­ate a pho­to­graph­ic image sev­er­al feet wide, made up of a sin­gle essen­tial­ly hand-drawn line. That will be a huge break­through for my process.